Both keeps very ambivalent ideas throughout the sex: as they chat otherwise consider gender nearly constantly, and also boast to help you anybody else about their intimate experience and knowledge, both are indeed fearful off intercourse, in reality is actually thinking-admitted virgins
D. Salinger’s Brand new Catcher on Rye, due to the fact term indicates, is actually a novel constructed on literary the thing is that and allusions; this means that, its champion, Holden Caulfield, might have been as compared to a number of other emails, regarding each other American and you can globe books.1 The nearest regarding Holden’s blood brothers, once the also a basic survey of the grievance of Salinger’s novel will show you, is named Huckleberry Finn.2 And you may indeed you can find known likenesses between Huck and Holden: they are both troubled kids on the run–emotionally, linguistically, and you will geographically–from a grown-up industry which they find pretentious, hypocritical, superficial, cruel, and you will harmful. step three Amazingly, even if, this type of anxiousness and you will obsessions try just the ones exhibited by the William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, one of several protagonists of the Voice additionally the Outrage. The answer to the fresh neurotic behavior regarding one another letters are based in the Freudian concept of anality, such as for instance because the you to idea has been amplified and you can reinterpreted because of the such as later psychologists since the Norman O. Brown and you will Ernest Becker. One another Holden and Quentin exhibit character traits that will be for the someone whoever development has been arrested from the anal phase.
The exterior parallels among them characters are often built, and striking. They are both wise, sensitive and painful, introspective, well-advised men: Holden try a great seventeen-year-dated prep school beginner who checks out “a great deal” (18) and whoever most useful topic is actually English (110); Quentin are a keen to try to get-year-old freshman at Harvard that knows Latin and estimates St. Francis. cuatro Additionally, one another Holden and Quentin investment their intimate anxiety onto their sisters, implementing a defensive, “your government” emotions and looking so you’re able to club the new sisters’ entrances into carnal education. Eventually, the mislead and you will interrupted rational says direct each other Holden and you can Quentin so you can contemplate committing suicide.5 Quentin, however, rather than Holden, indeed comes after using toward his demise desire to, to order a pair of apartment-irons for body loads immediately after which hurling himself regarding a link on the Charles River.
Nevertheless most significant specifics of Holden Caulfield’s characterization –his paralyzing anxiety about sexuality, their extremely defensive thoughts into their cousin, and his below average preoccupation having dying–is forgotten during the Twain’s portrait out of Huck
Because the advised earlier, the unifying emotional basis hidden each other Holden and you may Quentin’s anxiety from sex, females, and you may demise is usually to be found in the Freudian concept out-of anality. Predicated on Freud, the explanation of all adult neurosis is to be found in the latest repressed intimate wants out of childhood. Freud posited around three values from infantile intimate innovation: the newest oral (birth so you can a year), involving the facts from sucking and biting; the newest rectal (one to 3 years), focusing on new children’s fascination with the fresh arse and you can feces; as well as the phallic (two-and-a-half to help you half a dozen age), centering on the fresh new children’s advancement of your vagina. In the event the children’s passing because of every one of these stages isn’t negotiated efficiently and you may joyfully, the newest suppressed drives commonly resurface from inside the adulthood in the form of some neuroses. According to Freud, the adult character traits which can be of this denial and you may repression for the rectal stage are orderliness (and additionally neatness), obstinacy, and parsimony (or possessiveness).six
Having Freud, rectal fascination and you may gamble, like the kid’s tips for the most other phases of infantile innovation, are mainly assertions of one’s pleasure concept across the reality and you will morality values–exactly what do be regarded as in retrospect just like the futile attempts off the child so you’re able to embrace so you’re able to a keen Edenic field of innocent versatility and you will gamble when confronted with impending exile toward mature arena of functions and you may obligations. But afterwards psychologists like Norman O. Brownish and you can Ernest Becker have helped us to keep in mind that the brand new issue is somewhat more complicated than simply also Freud had recognized. Within his insightful and you may influential book, Existence Facing Dying, Brownish contends that what exactly is extremely being stamped on the understanding each and every people in the anal phase is absolutely nothing smaller than simply “the fresh conflict anywhere between all of our animal muscles, rightly epitomized about anal mode, and our pretentious sublimations, so much more particularly the fresh pretensions out of sublimated otherwise personal-Platonic like” (186). Quite simply, the newest anal standing stands for brand new child’s earliest stumble on with mortality and you can decay. Because the Becker cards, echoing Brown, “Having anal have fun with the kid has already been is a beneficial philosopher away from the human being position. However, as with any philosophers he’s still limited by it, with his fundamental task in life gets new denial off just what brand new asshole is short for: you to in fact, they are simply human anatomy in which character is worried. Nature’s beliefs is bodily viewpoints, person viewpoints is mental opinions, and though it grab the loftiest aircraft he is depending upon a stool, impossible without one, always cut back to they” (31). The latest conflict experienced because of the kid from the anal phase, thus, is that of your body in place of your mind otherwise soul, the real in place of 
an appropriate.