How Salinger, Twain And Shakespeare Tackle Youth In The Coming-Of-Age Tale

It is a challenge to write, to depict in ink, feelings that most people have trouble even pinpointing. Maybe that's why you don't see many authors tackling the subject of adolescence, that mystifying wilderness between childhood and adulthood. It's a tough concept to grasp mainly because it's tough to understand the changes while your teenage self is experiencing it; you gain new outlooks on life, and people, and society and relationships and as soon as you think you have everything figured out, you figure out that you don't. The process is complex and different for every individual--how can you create an archetype that attempts to capture all the aspects of growing up? Ask J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain, and, to a lesser extent, William Shakespeare because they did just that with Holden Caulfield (from The Catcher in the Rye), Huckleberry Finn (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and Hamlet (Hamlet), respectively.

Many comparisons between Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield can be made through external examination. Both are young men, for example, who grow up in situations that neither of them can stand to live in. Huck's mother has passed away and his drunkard father hasn't "been seen for more than a year," basically leaving Huck to fend for himself; Holden has been bounced from preparatory school to preparatory school and considers his childhood "lousy." So both decide to leave, to run away from what symbolizes adult protection and supervision (for Huck, ; for Holden, Pencey Prep.) in search for--what? As Eric Lomazoff puts it, the two are "seeking independence, growth and stability in their lives." What they find, though, is a world foreign to them, contrary to the sheltered lives they have led to that point. Richard Eder explains the idea as a series of moments when our so-called "expertise" at youth-dom "crumbles trying to find a way into the mysteries threatened by life to come." He clarifies: "For Huck it was life and death along the Mississippi and his encounter, half a raft-length away, with Jim and slavery. For Holden Caulfield it was a journey both in and out, though briefer and less adventurous."

Their observations during the adventures (what Eder calls flashes "of undeflected light just before the cloudy refractions of growing up"), open Huck and Holden's eyes to the clockworks of the societies they live in. Lomazoff quotes John Aldrige: "[The Catcher in the Rye and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] study in the spiritual picaresque, the joinery that for the young is all one way, from holy innocence to such knowledge as the world offers, from the reality which illusion demands and thinks it sees to the illusion which reality insists, at the point of madness, we settle for."

Finn and Caulfield react in different ways to the illusions. Huck, faced by racist, dishonest, and villainous characters, immediately turns to mischievousness to correct wrongdoings. He steals money back from two frauds (calling themselves the duke and the dauphin) who swindled a town into buying tickets to a short, unsatisfactory show, for example. When the two scammers pretend that their brother has died, Huckleberry comments that "It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race." As the novel progresses, Finn develops a moral code that he lacked at the story's beginning, mainly because he, then, was not experienced with the extent of man's misconduct and indecency.

Caulfield, on the other hand, turns to alcohol, prostitution and other vices that make him feel better to counteract against his feelings of separation from his community. He internalizes his thoughts and sentiments, passing judgment on others. His rebellion against a society he is unhappy with is to complain about it, whereas Huckleberry Finn takes action.

Shakespeare's Hamlet is like Holden in that (as Charles Kregel writes) both are "sad, screwed-up guys." Louis Menand writes: "The world is sad, Oscar Wilde said, because a puppet was once melancholy. He was referring to Hamlet, a character he thought had taught the world a new kind of unhappiness--the unhappiness of eternal disappointment in life as it is...Whether Shakespeare invented it or not, it has proved to be one of the most addictive of literary emotions...For many Americans who grew up in the nineteen-fifties, "The Catcher in the Rye" is the purest extract of that mood. Holden Caulfield is their sorrow king."

Both characters are saddened by the lying, the insincerity surrounding their lives. Hamlet is lied to by his step-father and uncle, King Claudius, and his mother, Queen Gertrude, about the murder of his father King Hamlet. As Lomazoff puts it, Hamlet is "bothered by words which only seem true, but are really quite phony." In the same way, Caulfield uses the term "phony" throughout The Catcher in the Rye to describe who or what he feels is superficial, artificial and fake. Holden, while trying his hardest to remain honest to himself, eventually comes to the realization that everyone has to be "phony" one in awhile if "you want to stay alive." This is in accordance with Hamlet who has to pretend that he is mad in order to uncover the truth behind his father's murder and prove to Claudius that he is no longer a threat. Like Huck, Hamlet responds to what he believes to be wrong through action.

Many comparisons can be drawn between Holden Caulfield, Hamlet and Huckleberry Finn just in the realm of subjects dealing with growing up, of entering a world that is promising, yet frightening and ruthless.

Works Citied

Eder, Richard. "Escaping childhood to inhale a whiff of freedom." The New York Times. New York: September 29, 1999. pg. E.8.
Lomazoff, Eric. "The Praises and Criticisms of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye." May 2, 2004.
Menand, Lewis. "The Catcher in the Rye and what is spawned." The New Yorker. New York: October 1, 2001.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: New American Library, 1959.