“The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger (post 2): Holden switches back and forth between his host personality and a younger alternate personality.

A sixteen or seventeen year old may or may not be on his best behavior. He may act more or less mature, depending on the circumstances. Nevertheless, he and others always think of him as being sixteen or seventeen, not as switching back and forth between being sixteen or seventeen and being twelve or thirteen.

Unless he has multiple personality.

A sixteen or seventeen year old who has multiple personality usually has a younger alternate personality, whose mental age corresponds to the year of a traumatic experience. If the trauma happened when he was twelve or thirteen, then the mental age of his alternate personality may be twelve or thirteen.

Holden Caulfield

“…I act quite young for my age sometimes. I was sixteen then and I’m seventeen now, and some times I act like I’m about thirteen. It’s really ironical because I’m six foot two and half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head…I’ve had [gray hair] ever since I was a kid. And I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true. People always think something’s all true…Sometime I act a lot older than I am—I really do—but people never notice it. People never notice anything” (1, pp. 11-12).

“I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them, I really don’t. I slept in the garage the night [his younger brother died, from leukemia], and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon…but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it…” (1, p. 44).

Comments

It is not clear to what the gray hair is related. Did it happen when his bother died, making it a mark of that trauma? Or is it related to fact that he sometimes acts “a lot older than I am” and may also have an older alternate personality? Perhaps he got the gray hair from the traumatic experience, but then the gray hair prompted the development of an older alternate personality.

In regard to his breaking the windows after his brother died, it is significant that he “hardly didn’t even know I was doing it.” That is, he may have had a memory gap for breaking the windows—because an alternate personality did it—and what he is telling us about it is mainly from what other people told him, from his later seeing the broken windows, and from the evidence of his broken hand.

1. J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye [1951]. New York, Little Brown, 2014.