Grief and Loss in Jerome David Salinger‘s The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Abstract

Grief is known to be the emotion experienced after a loss due to the intense private feelings of attachment that a human being holds towards someone or something. The topic of grief emerged as an early 20th century invention in the psychology field. An essay introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1917 influenced upcoming contemporary models of grief, such as Elizabeth kübler-Ross and David Kessler‘s model, which divided the emotion of grief into five stages.They published a book entitled On Grief and Grieving, year 2005. The model of gief was previously discussed by Elizabeth Kübler Ross in her previous work On death and Dying, year 1969, reveling the five stages of death, namely: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This study aims to identify the stages of grief in J.D. Salinger‘s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), for it investigates the grieving process of a young adolescent named Holden Caulfield by applying Kübler Ross model of grief. Based on a review of the literature on Kübler Ross model and other theories on the grieving process, a qualitative thorough analysis was executed in the designated work entitled The Catcher in the Rye (1951), in order to indicate the grieving stages of its protagonist. The analysis of J.D. Salinger‘s novel identified the grief experienced by its protagonist, which evoked the five stages of grief. The results were that the chosen material illustrates the stages of grief over three different types of losses, namely: feeling of loss over leaving a place, loss of a child‘s innocence, and loss over a loved member.