Did you actually ever have a sis?”: Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Faulkner’s Quentin Compson

Each other has very ambivalent thoughts on intercourse: while they speak otherwise consider gender almost always, as well as offer to help you others regarding their sexual experience and knowledge, both are indeed afraid regarding gender, indeed are notice-admitted virgins

D. Salinger’s This new Catcher about Rye, because name suggests, is a manuscript built on literary parallels and you may allusions; as a result, its hero, Holden Caulfield, might have been as compared to many most other characters, of each other American and you can world literature.step one The closest away from Holden’s bloodstream brothers, because the even a basic questionnaire of the ailment away from Salinger’s novel can tell you, may be recognized as Huckleberry Finn.dos And you can yes you can find celebrated likenesses ranging from Huck and Holden: they are both stressed teenagers on the run–emotionally, linguistically, and you will geographically–out of an adult community that they come across pretentious, hypocritical, low, horrible, and you may unsafe. step three Remarkably, regardless if, such stress and anxiety and you may obsessions is actually just the of these displayed by the William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, among the protagonists of your Sound and the Fury. The answer to this new neurotic behavior of one another characters would be based in the Freudian principle away from anality, including as one to idea could have been amplified and you may reinterpreted by such as for instance later on psychologists once the Norman O. Brown and you can Ernest Becker. Each other Holden and Quentin showcase character traits which might be of the some body whoever development might have been arrested from the anal phase.

The surface parallels between the two emails can be situated, and you will hitting. Both are brilliant, delicate, introspective, well-advised teenage boys: Holden are a seventeen-year-old prep school beginner just who checks out “a great deal” (18) and you will whose top subject try English (110); Quentin try an to try to get-year-dated freshman during the Harvard who knows Latin and you will rates St. Francis. 4 More over, one another Holden and you will Quentin investment the intimate nervousness on to their sisters, implementing a protective, “your government” thoughts and seeking to help you club the fresh new sisters’ entry on the carnal knowledge. Finally, its mislead and you can disturbed rational states direct both Holden and you may Quentin to think about committing suicide.5 Quentin, of course, as opposed to Holden, actually uses courtesy into their passing wish, to get a set of flat-irons to have human body weights following hurling themselves out of a connection into the Charles Lake.

Nevertheless the biggest details of Holden Caulfield’s characterization –their paralyzing concern with sex, their extremely protective feelings on the their sibling, along with his below average preoccupation with demise–are destroyed for the Twain’s portrait of Huck

As ideal prior to, this new unifying mental basis underlying both Holden and Quentin’s anxiety off sexuality, girls, and you may death will be based in the Freudian theory regarding anality. According to Freud, the rationale of the many mature neurosis is to be utilized in the new stifled intimate desires from childhood. Freud posited three level out of infantile intimate advancement: the latest oral (delivery so you’re able to yearly), amongst the situations regarding drawing and you may biting; brand new anal (you to 3 years), centering on the latest child’s love for the newest arsehole and you will feces; plus the phallic (two-and-a-half to help you six many years), centering on new child’s breakthrough of one’s snatch. Should your child’s passageway as a consequence of every one of these phase isn’t negotiated efficiently and you will joyfully, the new suppressed pushes often resurface for the adulthood in the form of individuals neuroses. Centered on Freud, the adult personality traits that will be in the assertion and you will repression in the anal phase is orderliness (and additionally neatness), obstinacy, and you will parsimony (otherwise possessiveness).6

To own Freud, anal curiosity and you can play, like the child’s tips from inside the other phases out-of infantile invention, are primarily assertions of your fulfillment idea along the reality and you may morality standards–exactly what can be considered into the retrospect as useless effort out of the child to stick to an enthusiastic Edenic field of simple versatility and you may enjoy facing following exile towards the mature arena of work and you can obligations. However, after psychologists for example Norman O. Brown and you will Ernest Becker keeps aided me to keep in mind that new issue is considerably more difficult than simply actually Freud got recognized. Within his informative and you will important book, Life Facing Demise, Brown argues you to what exactly is extremely being stamped toward consciousness each and every people from inside the rectal phase is absolutely nothing faster than simply “the fresh conflict anywhere between all of our creature human body, rightly epitomized on the anal mode, and you can the pretentious sublimations, alot more specifically the pretensions regarding sublimated otherwise intimate-Platonic like” (186). Put another way, new anal updates means the fresh new child’s earliest come across with mortality and decay. While the Becker notes, echoing Brownish, “Having anal have fun with the son is already to be a good philosopher of the human status. However, as with any philosophers he could be nonetheless bound by they, and his chief activity in daily life will get the latest assertion out of exactly what brand new asshole means: you to in fact, he could be only human anatomy where nature is worried. Nature’s beliefs was bodily thinking, people viewpoints try rational values, and though it use the loftiest routes he is mainly based on a stool, hopeless without it, always brought back in order to they” (31). The fresh disagreement educated from the man at anal stage, therefore, is that of one’s human anatomy rather than your body and mind otherwise soul, the genuine instead of a suitable.