Bird in the House and The Catcher in the Rye

¶ … Bird in the House and the Catcher in the Rye

Both J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye and Margaret Laurence's collection of interrelated stories A Bird in the House highlight the struggles of the main characters as they come of age in unforgiving times with largely unsympathetic families, but the ways in which either character deals with these issues differ greatly, and comparing the two will help to reveal the particular statements each narrative makes about growing up and coming of age.

Holden Caulfield, the central character of The Catcher in the Rye, does not deal with his journey into adulthood well, not least of all because more than anything he desires to keep others from having to leave their childhood behind, and wants to become the titular catcher in the rye, catching children before they fall off a cliff that is adulthood. Of course, even Holden's desire to be a "catcher in the rye" belies the fact that he has not really even entered adulthood, but is rather still a child mostly playing at being an adult; Holden mishears a poem and believes it is about one person "catching" another in a field rye, rather than two people meeting.

In fact, most of Holden's journey throughout the story is literally him pretending to be an adult, whether that means trying to be served in a bar, paying a prostitute, and pretending to have gotten shot by said prostitute's pimp (in which case he is actually pretending to be an adult pretending to be a different adult). Holden is afraid of becoming an adult and feels as if he is losing some of his innocence by seeing the cruelty and indiscriminate violence of the world, so instead of attempting to enjoy what little childhood he has by remaining in school, he decides to dive headlong into adulthood by faking it, something that ultimately overwhelms him such that he must retire to a mental health retreat, essentially allowing himself to revert back to a place of protection and innocence.

In contrast to The Catcher in the Rye, the main character of A Bird in the House tells her story with far more temporal distance, allowing her to imbue her younger self with a much more astute observational skill than she likely had. Nonetheless, one may still see how the younger Vanessa MacLeod dealt with the pressures of growing up following the Great Depression. In particular, the story which gives the collection its name, in which Vanessa must come to terms with her father's death, reveals some of the ways in which she attempts to manage the transition from child to adult.

In particular, her father's death coincides with her realization that she does not believe in the formalized superstition of religion, even as the folk superstition of the bird in the house foreshadows her father's death and cements itself into her psyche. In addition, Vanessa's decision to stay "close beside [her] mother" following her father's death, not out of her own need but rather because she "also had the feeling that [her mother] needed [her] protection" demonstrates how her father's death precipitates a genuine maturation in Vanessa (Laurence, 1993, p. 103). In contrast to Holden's selfish desire to keep children from falling off the cliff into adulthood (which is really just his own repressed desire to revert back to a more innocent state himself), Vanessa's desire to protect her mother stems from a genuine concern, especially because Vanessa's newfound atheism allows her to realize that her father is well and truly gone, and that her biggest concern should be the health of the living.