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'DID YOU EVER HAVE A SISTER?": SALINGER'S HOLDEN CAULFIELD AND FAULKNER'S QUENTIN COMPSON Robert W. Hamblin, Southeast Missouri State University J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, as the title suggests, is a novel built on literary parallels and allusions; as a result, its hero, Holden Caulfield, has been compared to a host of other characters, from both American and world literature. 1 The closest of Holden's blood brothers, as even a cursory survey of the criticism of Salinger's novel will reveal, is generally thought to be Huckleberry Finn. 2 And certainly there are notable likenesses between Huck and Holden: both are troubled adolescents on the run--psychologically, linguistically, and geographically--from an adult world that they find pretentious, hypocritical, shallow, cruel, and dangerous. But the most significant details of Holden Caulfield's characterization --his paralyzing fear of sexuality, his overly protective attitude toward his sister, and his unhealthy preoccupation with death--are missing in Twain's portrait of Huck. 3 Interestingly, though, these anxieties and obsessions are precisely the ones exhibited by William Faulkner's Quentin Compson, one of the protagonists of The Sound and the Fury. The key to the neurotic behavior of both characters can be found in the Freudian theory of anality, particularly as that theory has been amplified and reinterpreted by such later psychologists as Norman O. Brown and Ernest Becker. Both Holden and Quentin exhibit character traits that are associated with individuals whose development has been arrested at the anal stage. The surface similarities between the two characters are

Robert Hambling - Did You Ever Have a Sister

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