Black and White Vision

Ohmann's essay aptly historicizes The Catcher in the Rye in the context of the 1950s,, bringing in a great class reading of Holden Caulfield's actions. It does seem that the novel often loses its historical context in the popular imagination. As a coming of age novel, it is often discussed as representing American adolescence as a whole, despite its firmly gendered and classed themes. Holden clearly comes from an extremely privileged background, as evidenced by his prep schools, suitcases and the upscale hotel that he goes to in Manhattan. Ohmann's discussion of Holden's ambivalence regarding class provides an adroit reading of the novel and insight into Holden's frustration with bourgeois social forms but inability to discover a way out of them. This explains Holden's tendency to approach phonies (he invites Ackerman to see a movie with him) and phony places despite his disdain for them.

Coming, as we do, from an exploration of the red scare of the 1950s and the Hollywood blacklist, I see Holden's ambivalence and fears about capitalism directly related to the suppression of leftist discourse in America following WWII. Ohmann writes that the novel does not present the possibility of changing society, only of escaping the hypocrisy of the post-war bourgeois world or joining it and becoming a part of the system. This could be seen as the ultimate result of capitalism's victory over America and the silencing of voices that presented social alternatives. Holden lacks the language to fully express his desires for an egalitarian, humane world to live in, blaming it on his “poor vocabulary” and tendency to act like a 13 year old. However, he lives in a world that has been stripped down to black and white, as Ohmann points out. There is the red menace in Asia, or American democracy and capitalism. And this diametric vision—influenced by cold war logic—seems at the center of Holden's conflicts and refusal to see nuance or complication in the people he meets or the world he's trying to live in. Additionally, last week's reading about loyalty in the red scare illustrates the cold war logic of completely accepting the world as it is in order to prove loyalty. In this way, Holden's feelings of intellectuality and inability to alter his world seem to be symptoms of America's war on Communism following WWII.