Both has very ambivalent feelings regarding sex: as they cam or contemplate sex nearly constantly, plus offer to someone else regarding their sexual knowledge and experience, they are both indeed afraid out-of gender, indeed are care about-admitted virgins
D. Salinger’s The newest Catcher regarding the Rye, since the title means, is actually a book built on literary the thing is that and you will allusions; as a result, the champion, Holden Caulfield, might have been versus a number of almost every other emails, out of both Western and you can industry literature.step 1 New nearest of Holden’s bloodstream brothers, given that even a basic questionnaire of your issue away from Salinger’s unique will reveal, are named Huckleberry Finn.2 And yes you can find popular likenesses anywhere between Huck and you will Holden: they are both stressed teens on the move–psychologically, linguistically, and you may geographically–regarding a grown-up globe that they discover pretentious, hypocritical, superficial, vicious, and you can hazardous. step three Amazingly, although, these types of anxiousness and you may obsessions try just the of them shown by the William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, one of many protagonists of your Voice additionally the Frustration. The key to brand new neurotic choices out-of both emails is going to be based in the Freudian idea off anality, like since one to principle could have been amplified and you will reinterpreted because of the like after psychologists as the Norman O. Brownish and you can Ernest Becker. Both Holden and you may Quentin display character traits that are associated with the some body whoever development might have been detained on rectal stage.
The outside parallels among them letters are typically built, and you may hitting. They are both brilliant, delicate, introspective, well-told teenage boys: Holden is actually a beneficial seventeen-year-old creating college beginner exactly who checks out “much” (18) and you will whoever most readily useful topic is English (110); Quentin is an to try to get-year-old freshman at Harvard that knows Latin and you may quotes St. Francis. cuatro More over, one another Holden and you can Quentin opportunity their sexual anxiety onto their sisters, implementing a defensive, “government” attitude and seeking to help you bar this new sisters’ entrance towards the carnal knowledge. Fundamentally, its perplexed and you may disrupted intellectual says direct both Holden and Quentin so you can think about committing suicide.5 Quentin, without a doubt, rather than Holden, in reality follows owing to on the their demise wish to, to invest in a set of flat-irons for body weights following throwing themselves of a bridge toward Charles Lake.
However the greatest details of Holden Caulfield’s characterization –their paralyzing fear of sex, their extremely defensive thoughts towards his aunt, and his awesome substandard preoccupation that have death–was forgotten from inside the Twain’s portrait regarding Huck
Due to the fact recommended before, the fresh unifying emotional grounds underlying each other Holden and you can Quentin’s stress and anxiety out-of sex, women, and dying is going to be based in the Freudian theory out-of anality. Based on Freud, the rationale of all of the mature neurosis is going to be included in the brand new repressed sexual desires of childhood. Freud posited three amount from infantile intimate development: the oral (delivery so you’re able to twelve months), involving the items regarding drawing and you may biting; brand new anal (that three years), concentrating on the children’s fascination with the newest asshole and stools; and chatango support phallic (two and a half in order to half a dozen ages), centering on the brand new kid’s knowledge of vagina. Whether your kid’s passage thanks to each of these phases is not negotiated successfully and you will gladly, the newest stifled drives usually resurface in the adulthood when it comes to various neuroses. Based on Freud, the mature personality traits that are of the assertion and you will repression during the rectal stage are orderliness (together with neatness), obstinacy, and you may parsimony (or possessiveness).6
Getting Freud, anal curiosity and play, like the kid’s steps into the most other phase regarding infantile innovation, are mainly assertions of one’s satisfaction concept over the reality and morality principles–so what can be regarded as within the retrospect because the useless efforts from the kid to help you embrace in order to a keen Edenic world of innocent independence and enjoy in the face of impending exile towards mature field of work and you can responsibility. However, afterwards psychologists like Norman O. Brownish and you can Ernest Becker possess aided me to understand that the latest concern is considerably more complicated than simply even Freud had approved. In his insightful and you can important guide, Lifestyle Up against Demise, Brown contends that what is really getting stamped to your awareness each and every people for the rectal phase is nothing shorter than “the new argument ranging from all of our animal body, appropriately epitomized on anal form, and you may our very own pretentious sublimations, significantly more particularly the brand new pretensions out-of sublimated or close-Platonic like” (186). Put differently, the new rectal position signifies the brand new child’s earliest stumble on with mortality and you can decay. Since the Becker cards, echoing Brown, “Which have rectal play the guy has already been to be a great philosopher out of the human being status. However, like all philosophers he could be however limited by it, and his fundamental task in daily life becomes the fresh assertion off just what the fresh arse stands for: you to indeed, they are just human body in which characteristics is concerned. Nature’s beliefs try physical beliefs, peoples philosophy are mental opinions, and even though it use the loftiest flights they are created up on a stool, impossible without it, always brought back in order to they” (31). The brand new conflict knowledgeable of the child in the rectal stage, for this reason, would be the fact of the human body in place of the brain otherwise spirit, the genuine in place of a suitable.