Academic Review 2024

5 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2024

which Salinger gives Holden is reminiscent of the attitude that Holden’s schoolmates at Pencey Prep would boast about; as recalled by him, they would simply ‘talk about girls and liquor and sex all day’ (p. 146). Holden seems to have absorbed this mode of thinking, although valuing sex on an emotional level – he seems to have adopted such mannerisms as a way to shield himself from questioning what sex truly means. By putting sex down at the forefront of Holden’s mind as simply something to get over and done with, Salinger evinces that Holden does not feel the need to question what sex truly means to him. Sunny causes him to realise that by having sex, he is crossing the threshold between adolescence and adulthood (Helenius, 2014), something against which he is so stubbornly fighting. This is reflected in the structural parallelism as he opens his door to let Sunny in: he ‘had [his] suitcase right in the way and [he] fell over it …. damn near [breaking his] knee’. Holden quite literally stumbles over and falls on that very threshold, both physically and figuratively. Sunny elicits this new struggle within Holden, challenging the reasons why he even considered having sex. Emotional fragility in society As well as bringing out Holden’s personal struggles with sex, Salinger reveals that Sunny’s interactions with Holden also cast light on his emotional fragility. Throughout the novel, Holden is constantly criticising society and the ‘phoniness’ of adulthood, yet he simultaneously tries to mirror his behaviour to that of adults, blocking off and lying about any emotions or tendencies which he deems as ‘weak’ and unsuited for adulthood. He must be given the contagious, almost universal disease of phony adultism, in order to ‘cure’ his mental health (Heiseman & Miller, Jr, 1963). Sunny poses a challenge to this habit of his, as we see Holden’s ‘tough’ emotional front gradually crumble. As soon as he first meets Sunny, Holden introduces himself as suave twenty-two-year-old ‘Jim Steele’ (p. 105). The irony of his choice of name is very apparent, as the strong, smooth impression the name ‘Steele’ (homophonic to steel) implies, is highly incongruent with what happens later as Holden opens the door to Sunny and Maurice (Sunny’s pimp) with

his voice ‘shaking like hell’ (p. 112) and then ultimately lies on the floor in tears after being punched by Maurice. Salinger highlights that Holden is trying to level himself on the same playing field as those of adults but is neither emotionally mature nor robust enough to do so. Whilst Sunny is taking money from his wallet, stating that ‘all [she’s] takin’ is the five [he] owes her and that ‘[she’s] no crook’ (p. 115), Salinger’s regular use of contractions in her speech bestows a sense of nonchalance and youthfulness to her already unintimidating nature, yet Holden starts crying in response, proclaiming that ‘he’d give anything if [he] hadn’t [cried], but [he] did’ (p. 115). The bare, mostly monosyllabic words he uses to admit to his tears at the very end of his sentence, indicate just how shameful and embarrassed he is of his own emotional fragility, especially at the hands of someone like Sunny – a young female prostitute. Sunny’s actions and words culminate in the disintegration of Holden’s ‘adult’ act, revealing the nuances and contradictions of Holden’s emotional state. its superficiality. After Sunny tells him that she is from Hollywood he states, ‘I don’t think I could ever do it with somebody that sits in a stupid movie all day long.’ Helenius (2014, p. 31) puts forward the idea that Holden declines to have sex with Sunny because he is ‘afraid of the consequences of it to the innocence of himself and [Sunny], and of what an indelible shove it would be over the threshold between adolescence and adulthood’. In his opinion ‘Holden’s motivation for remaining a virgin lies in his ferocious drive for preserving innocence on the one hand and his reluctance to transition to adulthood on the other.’ By describing Holden’s interactions with Sunny, Salinger suggests that by preserving his virginity, Holden thinks that he is therefore preventing the death of his innocence, and furthermore protecting the little innocence that Sunny has left. However, there may be other reasons why Holden avoids having sex with Sunny. Tolchin (2007) argues that Holden ‘concocts a lie about having had an operation to avoid sex with a prostitute so as to conceal a profound lack of interest in [Sunny’s] body’. I, however, think that Holden avoids having sex with Sunny not because he is uninterested in her body – he is depressed as she reminds him of everything he dislikes about adult society, in particular