The "Fall"

    The Catcher in the Rye, despite its sarcastic tone and unserious narrator, has some incredible Biblical themes that I couldn't stop thinking about. The thing that most interested me was "the Fall" mentioned by Holden after being beat up on page 104, prevented by Holden's imagined job of "the Catcher in the Rye" on page 173, and addressed on page 170 when James Castle presumedly jumped from the dorm room on a matter of principle. All of these instances are unique yet connected by their inclusion of "the fall."  Whether or not you believe what the Bible teaches or claims, these observations serve to me as striking literature parallels that I think would be a mistake to discard. 

    Let me begin with the first--and to me, most fascinating--reference to "the Fall" in The Catcher in the Rye. Holden tells Phoebe about how he would like to save children from falling off this imaginary cliff his mind has conjured up. He says, "I keep picturing these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all...what I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff" (Salinger, 173). A common theory for this job Holden wishes to hold is that the "fall" in this instance is the fall from innocence: the completion of the process of coming of age. This strikes me as very similar to the fall from grace--and innocence--in Genesis. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to which they have been explicitly instructed by God not to do, and their immediate initial response is to cover up their private parts. They lose their innocence. Holden, in his admiration of innocence and purity, would surely hate this, then, and the fall from innocence initiates a myriad of sin. When looking at the world through a lens of endless sin without redemption, as Holden does, it makes perfect sense to me that Holden wants to be the "Catcher in the Rye" for these children. He doesn't want the world to be so broken, and he doesn't want people to be as broken as he is. He knows how miserable that feels. He wants to be the savior, the martyr. He hopes that that will fix it.

    In keeping with the theme of martyrs, James Castle's martyrdom by falling undoubtedly influenced Holden's perceptions of how he should act in the face of adversity. The "fall" in this story is voluntary; Holden says, "Finally, what he did was, instead of taking back what he said, he jumped out the window" (Salinger, 170). It is quite distinct from the fall from the cliff of innocence, which seems inevitable, rather the fall was a conscious choice in order to change something. To change, in a sense, the state of the world, by dying for a cause. That sounds a lot like someone trying to be a savior to me, and it follows that Holden saw that and felt a twisted inspiration by it. 

    The final and most upsetting fall is Holden's threatened suicide after being beat up by Maurice. Although attempting to remain in his casual flippant manner, Holden lets slip, "What I really felt like, though, was commiting suicide. I felt like jumping out the window" (Salinger, 104). Holden's desire for an entirely new kind of fall--a fall that would not be out of martyrdom, not out of symbolic loss of innocence, but out of a simple need for escape, is perhaps the most tragic fall in the book. This fall is not the need to be the savior--to me, it reads as a need for a savior. Holden relies so consistently on people throughout the book, and without them he would be without a true reason to live. Hence why this fall is so dangerous and so concerning.

    The theme of the "fall" is far more complex than I can elucidate in a blog post (or elucidate at all), and countless more mentions of "falls" riddle this book (take, for example, Mr. Antolini's speech regarding the "fall"). But it was fun at least attempting to tackle aspects of it. I hope some of this made some sense...and that this blog post didn't "fall" short. Heh.