Do you ever has actually a cousin?”: Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and you will Faulkner’s Quentin Compson

Each other has highly ambivalent thoughts on sex: as they speak otherwise contemplate gender nearly always, and also boast to help you someone else about their intimate knowledge and experience, both are in reality fearful out of gender, in reality was mind-admitted virgins

D. Salinger’s The Catcher on the Rye, just like the name indicates, was a book built on literary parallels and allusions; this is why, its hero, Holden Caulfield, has been compared to the a number of most other letters, of one another American and you will world literature.step one New nearest out-of Holden’s blood brothers, as the also a cursory questionnaire of the complaint regarding Salinger’s unique will highlight, is seen as Huckleberry Finn.2 And you will certainly there are known likenesses ranging from Huck and you will Holden: both are stressed teens on the run–psychologically, linguistically, and you will geographically–off an adult community that they look for pretentious, hypocritical, low, cruel, and you will unsafe. step 3 Remarkably, even if, this type of anxieties and you may obsessions was precisely the of them presented from the William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, among the many protagonists of the Voice and Outrage. The key to the fresh neurotic choices of each other emails is found in the Freudian idea off anality, including due to the fact that idea might have been amplified and you will reinterpreted from the such later psychologists because the Norman O. Brownish and you can Ernest Becker. One another Holden and you can Quentin exhibit characteristics which can be of the individuals whose advancement could have been detained during the anal phase.

The surface similarities between them emails are typically created, and you will hitting. They are both practical, sensitive, introspective, well-told teenagers: Holden is actually a beneficial seventeen-year-dated preparing university student whom checks out “a lot” (18) and you will whose greatest topic is English (110); Quentin try an eighteen-year-dated freshman during the Harvard who knows Latin and estimates St. Francis. cuatro Moreover, one another Holden and you can Quentin venture the sexual stress on to their sisters, implementing a defensive, “big brother” thoughts and seeking so you can bar the brand new sisters’ access into the carnal studies. Fundamentally, their mislead and disturbed rational claims head both Holden and Quentin in order to contemplate committing suicide.5 Quentin, naturally, in lieu of Holden, indeed follows owing to towards their death wanna, purchasing a set of apartment-irons to own human body loads and then hurling himself away from a link with the Charles River.

Although greatest details of Holden Caulfield’s characterization –his paralyzing concern with sexuality, their very protective thinking with the their sis, along with his substandard preoccupation which have demise–is destroyed into the Twain’s portrait of Huck

Due to the fact suggested before, the brand new unifying emotional factor root one another Holden and you may Quentin’s anxiousness regarding sex, women, and death is going to be found in the Freudian idea regarding anality. Considering Freud, the explanation of all of the adult neurosis is to be used in the brand new repressed intimate wishes of youthfulness. Freud posited around three amount off infantile sexual innovation: the new dental (birth so you can one-year), between your circumstances of drawing and you may biting; the brand new anal (you to definitely 3 years), targeting the new child’s love for the anus and you may stools; and also the phallic (two and a half to half a dozen ages), focusing on the new children’s discovery of the pussy. If your child’s passageway through every one of these phases isn’t negotiated effectively and you will gladly, the new stifled drives usually resurface inside adulthood in the way of various neuroses. Centered on Freud, the adult personality traits that will be on the denial and repression from inside the rectal stage try orderliness (along with neatness), obstinacy, and you may parsimony (otherwise possessiveness).six

To have Freud, rectal interest and you will play, including the children’s measures during the almost every other phases out of infantile development, are mainly assertions of one’s pleasure idea along the truth and you may morality prices–exactly what do be viewed in retrospect since useless attempts regarding the little one in order to embrace so you’re able to an enthusiastic Edenic world of innocent liberty and you may enjoy in the face of following exile to your mature world of really works and you can responsibility. However, later psychologists for example Norman O. Brown and you may Ernest Becker provides helped me to just remember that , this new concern is considerably more challenging than just also Freud got accepted. Inside the informative and important publication, Lifetime Facing Dying, Brownish contends that what is really becoming stamped for the consciousness of each people during the anal stage is absolutely nothing faster than simply “the fresh dispute between our animal human anatomy, rightly epitomized regarding rectal means, and you will our very own pretentious sublimations, a lot more specifically the pretensions out-of sublimated otherwise personal-Platonic like” (186). Put another way, the fresh rectal reputation stands for the latest children’s earliest encounter which have mortality and you can decay. While the Becker cards, echoing Brownish, “Which have rectal have fun with the guy is already is a philosopher off the human being status. However, like all philosophers he is nevertheless limited by they, and his awesome main activity in life becomes the latest denial of what the fresh arse is short for: one to in reality, he could be just system in which character is concerned. Nature’s values was bodily viewpoints, peoples values is intellectual values, and although it do the loftiest routes he could be mainly based on excrement, impossible without one, constantly brought back so you can they” (31). The disagreement knowledgeable by the guy at rectal phase, hence, is the fact of the looks as opposed to your body and mind or soul, the real in place of an appropriate.