Atadja 1

Semefa Atadja
Mr.Schmidt
English 2A
March­6­2014
Diagnosis Of Caulfield, Holden
A military sergeant sits in the gunner's seat inside the M2A3 Bradley tank. With little room to move, he sees the battlefield, a white hot spot in the shape of a man. His hands wrap around the Cadillac handles, his thumbs clutch the laser targeting system. He has located his target and squeezes the trigger. The sergeant has never seen a man fall like that, life exiting his body, but he had no time grasp the sickening feeling that would follow such an event. It never occurred to him the feeling of helplessness and horror that the man must have endured. It's now difficult to accept knowing he had put that man through that experience. This event shall haunt him until he is laid to rest. The previous writings are a story of a soldier's experience on the battlefield. To him, life has now lost the meaning it once had. When he is deployed home, activities that he has once enjoyed no longer excites him. Memories of the moment he ended another person’s life follow him like his own shadow. The sergeant is now a victim too devastating guilt, irrational anger, and depression . He stays awake at night in search of something to distract him from his conscience. He has detached himself from everyone emotionally and socially. The sergeant takes comfort in isolating himself, he drinks to numb his emotions. He believes he is facing life alone. The hero has now become his own enemy.
For one thing, Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher In The Rye” is his own enemy. The subject isolates himself and drinks his emotion away. He stands atop a hilltop and watches his

Atadja 2

classmates at Pencey Prep go to the football game. Everything upsets this troubled teenager.
Memories of his brother’s death haunt him. Holden can only imagine the amount of pain his brother had gone through. Holden suffers from PTSD also known as post traumatic stress disorder. He has flashback, withdraws from social activities, is stressed, depressed, and has many different addictions. To resume, PTSD stands for post traumatic stress disorder. This is an illness in which the victim's mental state is unstable. According to WebMD, PTSD can be retained when an individual has had an experience of life threatening event in his/her or someone else's life. The individual diagnosed with PTSD usually responds to this event with fear, helplessness, or horror, as stated in the article “Ptsd in Children Adolescents” written by Jessica Hamble. PTSD is an anxiety disorder. People who are diagnosed with PTSD may have bad dreams or flashbacks about the event, depression, be easily startled, emotionally numb, have feelings of guilt, difficulty sleeping, or feeling tense. Subjects may also avoid people or objects that remind them of the event. This fits the health description of Holden Caulfield in the “Catcher in The Rye”.
There are two possible instances in which Holden may have developed PTSD; Holden witnessing a tragic suicide, and the unfortunate death of his younger brother Allie. Holden responds to these dire events in his life by having flashbacks, having depressed moods, emotionally detaching himself from everyone around him, and having random fits of rage.
Specifically, Mr. Caulfield throughout the novel also becomes more irritable, has difficulty concentrating, is easily startled, becomes stressed, and gains an addiction to cigarettes and alcohol. Also, victims of PTSD isolate themselves physically and emotionally because they

Atadja 3

cannot stand to be reminded about the horrific event, as stated by Robin Douglas. Holden shows signs of emotional, physical, and social detachment. For example, in the “Catcher in the Rye”,
Holden tells the reader "Anyway, it was the Saturday of the football game…I remember around three o'clock that afternoon I was standing way the hell up on top of Thomsen Hill... " (Salinger,
2). This proves that Holden