Saturday, February 9, 2013

What are some quotes about family in The Catcher in the Rye?

The Catcher in the Rye is full of quotes about family. Here are three to start, with a little information about each of them.
The very first sentences of the novel are about family:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.

This passage reveals Holden's attitude towards his own early life, or at least, it reveals how Holden feels about talking about his childhood. Here as well the reader can find some interesting information about how Holden perceives his parents and their protectiveness of their privacy.
Later in the novel, in part 5, Holden mentions his brother:

He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways.

This passage is also revealing as Holden is somehow simultaneously open and honest about a very sensitive family tragedy, while he is cagey about his family at the same time. He doesn't describe the not-nice behaviors in any detail, but the reader knows that they exist.
This passage about family can be found in part 15:

My father's quite wealthy, though. I don't know how much he makes––he's never discussed that stuff with me––but I imagine quite a lot. He's a corporation lawyer. Those boys really haul it in. Another reason I know he's quite well off, he's always investing money in shows on Broadway. They always flop, though, and it drives my mother crazy when he does it. She hasn't felt too healthy since my brother Allie died. She's very nervous. That's another reason why I hated like hell for her to know I got the ax again.

Holden is clear here about his guilt and his sense of responsibility for his mother's happiness, but he is less clear about how he feels about his father and his father's career. This lack of transparency makes for some interesting opportunities for literary analysis as the reader can go in a lot of different directions with the evidence here.

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