Question

What makes Holden depressed in Catcher in the Rye? Can you give a page number and quotation?

Answer 1

Holden gets depressed because of fake behaviors. In the beginning of the novel, Holden describes how it makes him depressed when the headmaster only talks with the parents of the students if they are good-looking. He explains it in this following quote:

I can’t stand that stuff. It drives me crazy. It makes me so depressed I go crazy. I hated that goddam Elkton Hills (Page 13)

Holden became sad in the novel when his mother gave him the skates which was in wrong size:

One thing about packing depressed me a little. I had to pack these brand-new ice skates my mother had practically just sent me a couple of days before. That depressed me. I could see my mother going in Spaulding’s and asking the salesman a million dopy questions-and here I was getting the ax again. It made me feel pretty sad. She bought me the wrong kind of skates-I wanted racing skates and she bought hockey-but it made me sad anyway. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad (Page 37,38)

Holden also disapproves the tourists who want to see the show in the first place. He considers it naive because these people think that they are getting somewhere with this, in his opinion they are not actually.

And that business about getting up early to see the first show at Radio City Music Hall depressed me. If somebody, some girl in an awful-looking hat, for instance, comes all the way to New York- from Seattle, Washington, for God’s sake-and ends up getting up early in the morning to see the goddam first show at Radio City Music Hall, it makes me so depressed I can’t stand it (Page 53)

Answer 2

Thoughts of suicide:
pg. 104 “What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would’ve done it, too.”

Doing badly in school:
pg. 4 “I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself."

Sad a lot:
pg. 98 “I felt miserable. I felt so depressed, you can’t imagine."

Self-destructive:
pg. 39 “I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it."