A STUDY OF HOLDEN CAULFIELD’S PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFLICT
THE MAIN CHARACTER IN J.D. SALINGER’S
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
By: Ahmad Faiqi
Human life is a kind of phases. Through the phases, human tries to find his own identity. During the phases, he gets him self into question, including what he is and what he should do in human interaction.
The questions on human’s mind then lead them into many ways of interactions and behaviors. Because the human is tied by the social construction, where they live, then there are different behaviors and attitudes of the human because of the different responses of these social constructions. And then it is called personality, human personality.
These phases of human life is that lead into many conflicts of human life, on each phase of human phases of life. And the deepest pain of conflict of human phases is that in adolescent phases, because adolescence is the transition age from childhood into adulthood.
The conflict, the identity crisis that happens in the adolescence age is the most important conflict human being found than any conflicts in other stages of life, because it will determine the human in facing the future. So it is why the role confusion that happens during teenagers is felt as the more painfully age.
Literature, as the one of the product of human, then also represents this human behaviors and interactions with all the conflicts within. It is almost similar with that Dryden (in Siswontoro, 2005:51) stated:
The function of literature is to provide a just and lively image of human nature or at least who agree on the general proposition that the end of literature is some kind of illumination of the human situation. (Daiches, 1981:328)
Fiction, or specifically novel, is one kind of literary work that almost completely records or restructures the human condition in imaginative and creative forms. As Siswontoro state (2005:29) that social realty, psychological realty or even religious realty are kind of terms often we heard when people talk about novel as life realty. It means that some phenomena that are found on a novel could be found on a real life. Whether it is a social phenomenon or psychological or other is depended to the reader as its audience or responder.
Further, the phenomena that are found on a literary works are then used as philosophical reference of the research. It is as that Siswontoro (2005:8) states:
In spite of this, the literature itself must something that could captivate the reader to read and understand it. And as the requirement of this, the literature must have aesthetics values and also must be structured with an aesthetic purpose. And the other one is that the literature must have a recognizable relation with the life, although the relation here is in various ways. It is as Wellek and Warren state:
Literature must always be interesting; it must always have a structure and an aesthetic purpose, a total coherence and effect. It must, of course, stand in recognizable relation to life, but the relation: the life can be heightened or burlesqued or antithesized; it is in any case a selection, of a specifically purposive sort, from life. We have to have knowledge independent of literature in order to know what the specific relation of a specific work to ‘life’ may be”, (1977:212).
As the explanation above, after reading The Catcher in the Rye, a novel of J.D. Salinger, the researcher found that it is interesting to take this novel into a scientific discussion. This novel, with the psychological phenomena within, talking about the personality of the main character “Holden Caulfield”, give us an explanation how when a teenager live between childhood world and adulthood that then leads to the psychological conflict of mind.
J.D. Salinger, his self, is an American novelist that was born in New York City on the first day of 1919 from Jewish Father and Christian Mother. After brief periods of enrolment at both NYU and Columbia University, Salinger devoted himself entirely to writing, and by 1940 he had published several short stories in periodicals (http://www.gradesaver.com/23/12/2006).
The novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is first published in United Stated in 1951. And since it was published it remains the controversial to this day. According to the American Library Association, it was the 13th most frequently challenged book of the 1990s. The novel also is one of the famous literary works of the 20th century, and a common part of high-school curricula across the United States and Canada. (www.wikipedia.com).
The Catcher in the Rye is novel talking about a teenager, in this case is Holden Caulfield, the main character in the novel, that live in confusing because he lives between two world that absolutely different both of them. The first world is the child world that he catches it as the innocence and the pure world, a world that talks and shows anything as how the anything is. The second world is the adult world that he regards it as the phony world. Adulthood, according to him, is a world that full of pretender and the people that could not act as they are. The adulthood is the world that full of crime, vulgarity and another amuse thing. And even he thinks that he is the phoniest one. Living between childhood and adulthood with all of the confusion, role confusion, finally bring him into the inner turbulence of his mind.
The role confusion that he felt may be the cause of his loneliness and lonesome that he felt during his psychological conflict. The role confusion that makes him in his psychological conflict is then to be something interested to be discussed through the aesthetic values of the novel, The Catcher in the Rye.
Based on all the explanation above, here, the researcher is interesting to take this novel as object of the research. Because, according to the researcher, this novel will give something valuable for the researcher especially, and for the people in general.
The research or the discussion about psychological phenomena of the novel is not to judge the novel as a good or bad novel fiction. But more of that, the researcher is meant to find, define, classify and evaluate the literary work whether the novel has some values that could be used as a model in living in this world, in living in the human world. It is that the human take a prize from what M.H. Abrams state about criticism in literature that “criticism is study concerned on with defining, classifying, analyzing and evaluating works of literature”, (1981:35).
This research, further, is to capture the humanistic values of the novel through the psychological phenomena, which the researcher has explained about it, as something could happen to us as a human, or people in common who feel that they are human.
To capture and explain the psychological phenomena that are found in the novel The Catcher in the Rye, the researcher uses the theory of psychology of Erik Homburger Erikson as the theoretical approach, because the researcher thinks that it is the appropriate to use after regarding the object that is going to be investigated.
