by : Raditya Darningtyas
According to Wikipedia, maturity
psychologically means the ability to respond to the environment
in an appropriate manner. Since the term ‘appropriate’ is too subjective of a
word, Dr. William Menninger established the progressive stages of emotional maturity
as the criteria whether or not someone is a hundred percent matured. Menninger’s
criteria are carefully listed with the intention that it has to be followed in
order without skipping any step. According to Menninger, an emotionally
immature person possesses the following characteristics:
Having
the ability to deal constructively with reality; having the capacity to adapt
to change; having a freedom from symptoms that are produced by tensions and
anxieties; having the capacity to find more satisfaction in giving than
receiving; having the capacity to relate to others in a consistent manner with
mutual satisfaction and helpfulness; having the capacity to direct one’s
instinctive hostile energy into creative constructive outlet; having the
capacity to love; living for a cause rather than dying for it.
The concept of growing up and getting
mature, which involves fear of losing
one’s innocence, confusion in dealing with the ambiguous adult world, and how
to adapt ourselves are intriguingly
explored in the infamous The Catcher in
the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Using
some of Menninger’s criteria, Salinger illustrates emotional immaturity through
Holden Caulfield’s failure to deal with reality by having the capacity to adapt
to change, his incapability to relate to other people with mutual satisfaction,
and his desire to die for a cause rather than living for one.
Even
though some may argue that Holden possess a bit of maturity based on his
ability to love especially toward children and his little sister, his emotional
immaturity is indubitably proven by his failure to deal with reality and having
the capacity to adapt to change. He is having a problem in dealing with present
truth and new reality around him. This inability makes him prefers the past
over present and tries to avert reality by inventing an imaginary plot in his
head. First, we can see his love for museum where everything stays the same and
seemingly easier to deal with. Holden is looking for his little sister Phoebe,
and then he goes to the park where she usually plays. Holden can’t find her at
the park and a little girl told him she might be at the museum. He talks about
this Museum of Natural Art that he used to go in a field trip when he was little
and how much he likes it: “I loved that damn museum. The best thing, though, in
that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. The only
thing that would be different would be you” (Salinger 120-121). Moreover, it is
obvious that Holden is still deeply troubled by the death of his little
brother, Allie. He is still unable to get over his grief and move on. When
Phoebe confronts him to mention one thing he likes in the world, he mentions
his deceased brother, Allie, seemingly having trouble choosing an actual living
person or things: “I like Allie. I know he’s dead! I can still like him,
though, can’t i? just because somebody’s dead, you don’t just stop liking them,
for God’s sake—especially if they were a thousand times nicer than the people
you know that’re alive and all” (171). Beside all these actions, Holden has
this habit of inventing an imaginary situation like he has been shot and has a
bullet in his gut whenever a bad episode happens to him. For instance, after he
lost in a fight with Stradlater, his roommate at Pencey Prep Boarding School,
he goes to the bathroom. Amazed by the blood on his face, he started to act
like he had been shot. Second time happens during his encounter with a
prostitute named Sunny and her pimp, Maurice, in a motel when he was forced to
pay for the ‘service’ more than what he has agreed on. Maurice beats him up and
takes his money. Holden goes to the bathroom afterwards and starts acting like
his belly were bleeding. Immediately, he starts picturing himself gong to
Maurice’s room to shoot him with a gun and wiping the fingerprints off the gun.
This is one of a coping mechanism Holden has invented to deal with his reality,
yet he puts the blames of movie. While imagining all this scenarios in his head
no longer serves its purpose to make him feel better, and when the realization
finally knocks him out of his reverie, he admits to himself what he really
feels. “What I really felt, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping
out the window. I probably would’ve done it, too, if I’d been sure somebody’d
cover me up as soon as I landed.”(104). According to Menninger, before someone
gets to the point where he could love somebody, he must be able to succeed at
the previous stages. Holden fails the process of getting matured because he
skips around the list and he is having it the other way around. These show how
Holden is immature by failing the first stage of emotional maturity right away,
which is to deal with reality and adapt to the changes.
Hold also lacks the ability to relate
to other with mutual satisfaction. Whenever he meets somebody, either stranger
or people he has known for a long time, he often focuses on their depraved
features and regards them with negative remarks. For instance, Holden tells us
a story about an old alumnus from Pencey Prep who came to his room during
Veterans Day. The old man asked Holden and his friends if they would mind letting
him use the bathroom because he wanted to see if his initial was still carved
in the bathroom. Instead of trying to understand his sentimentality and find a
way to sympathize, Holden finds this depressing and even accuses him of being
phony: “Boy, did he depress me! I don’t mean he was a bad guy. But you don’t
have to be a bad guy to depress somebody. All you have to do to depress
somebody is give them a lot of phony advice while you’re looking for your
initials in some can door..” (169). This quote shows that Holden lacks the
ability of relating to others positively to gain mutual satisfaction, he’d
rather finds something to hate from somebody. It would have been easier for him
to just try interacting with others without judging them and trying to look at
the bright side of every occurrence in his life. He could have just appreciated
the man’s fondness of Pencey Prep and try to take in the lesson from his advice
that might be valuable for him, so that both parties could gain fair advantage
of each other. That is him helping the man find his initials while he gets
something useful for him in return.
Holden’s
immaturity leads him to think about death every so often. Consequently, it
makes him believe that death would be a better solution for him, instead of
trying to deal with his life. His desire to die for a cause rather than living
for one leads him to fail the last step of Menninger’s emotional maturity
criteria. For example, he is telling us a story about how his big brother D.B used
to be in the army during the war. Then he keeps going on and on about books
that D.B has given to him and suddenly states his opinion about atomic bomb:
“Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever
another war, I’m going to sit the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I
swear to God I will.” (141). This quote proves Holden’s inclination to die for
a cause which is to ‘sit on top of atomic bomb’ in a war. In addition to that,
he keeps pondering the idea of him dying and how people who are close to him
would react to that, which is quite an immature thing to do. It happens after
he got out of a bar, he is sitting alone in Central Park in the middle of the
night, looking for the lake to find out where the ducks go when the lake in
frozen. He finds out that the lake was, “..partly frozen and partly not
frozen..” (154). The temperature was very cold and his head was wet, “I thought
probably I’d get pneumonia and die. I started picturing millions of jerks
coming to my funeral and all. The only good thing, I knew she wouldn’t let old
Phoebe come to my goddam funeral because she was only a little kid.” (154-155).
Holden sees death as the easy way out of dealing with his problems. By dying
for a cause, Holden believes that he would do a good thing while being able to
avoid and solve his problems altogether. His inability to reach this point of
emotional maturity is somehow makes sense, since he can’t even get past the
first stage, again proving that Holden is a complete immature individual.
Every
adult individual must have experienced the phase of adolescence. Being a
teenager who stuck in the middle of two worlds is definitely not an easy
position. One must try to understand the world they used to perceive
differently as a whole new world with its new ambiguity and anomaly. The
Catcher in the Rye tries to depict one example of struggle of a teenager in
dealing with his problems that come with a price of growing up, and Holden
fails to pay the price. In conclusion, he doesn’t have the ability to complete
the journey required to earn the maturity every teenager is supposed to earn.
Despite his effort to grow up, he still can’t get his ultimate goal to grow up
because he is trying to jump and skip around the order on Menninger’s list.
First, he can’t deal with the new reality that surrounds him because he is
still holding on too much on the past, making it impossible for him to succeed
at the next step in Menninger’s list. Then, he finds it difficult to correlate
with others in a positive manner without having to focus on someone’s negative
trait. Finally, his preference to serve a purpose by dying instead of living
adds to the evidence of his fiasco.
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