Alex Huang

5/10/10

Honors English II

The Impact of a Decision

How do you react to bad events? While many people have learned to understand that bad

things happen, many neglect to notice that their reactions are just as important as the causes and

lessons from to be learned those events. And while people may believe that these reactions are

complex and unique, the majority of people react in similar ways that are rather simplistic in

expression. The many reactions people have to events can usually be classified into two,

contrasting categories. These decisions are what define us as individuals. These decisions

become more and more important as we mature. These decisions we choose even become the

basis for later decisions. These decisions become the bases for the ways in which we see the

world. However, in order to grow, we must struggle through making our decisions. A major

source of struggle during maturity comes from a person’s need to make a difficult decision

because of disillusionment. During disillusionment, people tend to either resist and try to

preserve or return to a state of innocence, such as Holden in The Catcher in the Rye and Seymour

in “Bananafish,” or accept the disillusionment, which leads to a cynical viewpoint or attempts to

improve the issues, such as in “Christ Climbed Down” or as Mr. Smith does in Mr. Smith Goes

to Washington.

The first- and most natural- response to disillusionment is to resist the change in maturity,

as Holden does in Catcher and Seymour does in “Bananafish,” in an attempt to either prevent the

changes of maturity or to try to return to the state of innocence before they were disillusioned. In
The Catcher In the Rye, Holden is a young man struggling with disillusionment. In an effort to

preserve his way of thinking, he marks others as phony and fake, choosing instead to pick

vicariously at their faults while trying his best to avoid his own. He fears change. He values

innocence. He clings to the past. He believes that “the best thing… in that museum was that

everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move… Nobody’d be different. The only

thing that would be different would be you” (Salinger 121). His value for similarity, then, is not

in finding common attributes in different places and situations; rather, it is the value of things

that do not change. This is, essentially, Holden’s reaction to disillusionment. Holden was

emotionally and psychologically damaged by the deaths of his brother, Allie, and his classmate

which brought him anguish, pain, and suffering. Holden’s view of life becomes fixated on the

idea that things that do not change do not cause harm. The result is his resistance to change and

rejection of all people that accept change as a part of life. As Holden sees life progressing around

him, he has difficulty accepting that he must move along with it. While Holden struggles to

move forward, he ultimately feels that he is incapable of doing so (leading to his desire to return

to his earlier state of innocence). In addition, he resists the growth that he feels is inevitably

coming, and, by doing things such as failing out of Pencey Prep, he resists the changes he feels

as his disillusionment starts to take effect on his personality. A similar outlook and reaction to

disillusionment can be seen in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” when Seymour Glass reveals his

struggle with disillusionment. Seymour’s struggle with disillusionment results from his

participation in war. During the story, Seymour’s struggle to assimilate back into general society

is clear; his present person, contrasted with who he was in the past, represents his newfound

inability to partake in general society. Seymour’s fears, however, are that, now that he has

experienced disillusionment, he is unable to return to his state of innocence before the war. This
belief is symbolized by his statement about the bananafish. After they eat their bananas, similar

to how people experience disillusionment, “they’re so fat that they can’t get out of the hole

again” (Bananafish 9). Thus, Seymour believes that, after disillusionment, it is impossible to

return. This belief is a result from his difficulties maturing as a person and relating to adults and

his inability to retain his innocence and relate to children. This was exemplified by how he could

not connect with Muriel and the woman on the beach and when he was incapable of completely

regaining his innocence while talking to Sybil on the beach. Incapable of both returning to a state

of innocence and moving forward with his life, Seymour is pushed to suicide. Conversely,

Holden’s struggle against disillusionment leads him to the eventual realization that fighting his

disillusionment was the cause of his depression. Thus, the resistance to disillusionment and the

value of things that “stayed right where” they were and the belief that things can’t “get out of the

[symbolic] hole again,” represented by the resistance from Holden and Seymour, leads to

suffering and the natural responses of attempting to preserve or return to previous states of

innocence but is not necessarily a fatal response to disillusionment.

However, while Holden and Seymour attempt to resist their disillusionment, the Beats, in

the poem “Christ Climbed Down,” and Mr. Smith, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, accept their

disillusionment and base their viewpoints around it. In the Beat poem “Christ Climbed Down,”

the author’s disillusionment results primarily from what he learns about the materialism he sees

during Christmas. However, his reaction to disillusionment is not resistance or attempts to return

to innocence; instead, he does the opposite: he accepts the disillusionment as truth. The author,

represented by Christ, “awaits again” (Christ) for “the very craziest of/ Second Comings”

(Christ). His “second coming” can be interpreted as the new outlook the author has on

Christmas: that, since Christmas is materialistic, his acting crazy is a way to show his disdain for
this tradition. His bitter acceptance of this disillusionment is a clear contrast to the decisions

made by Holden and Seymour. Mr. Smith, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, is another person

who accepts disillusionment. After understanding the corruption of the Senate and the power of

the Taylor political machine, Mr. Smith’s disillusionment leads to his renewed desire to reform

politics. His new viewpoint that “there's no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or

compromise with human liberties” is the culmination of his growth; moreover, his

disillusionment was the motivation he had to make this belief a reality. Thus, in both “Christ

Climbed Down” and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the reaction of acceptance of the “graft, or

greed, or lies” that cause disillusionment is “the very craziest” reaction possible, but becomes the

reason for the new viewpoint of scorn or the new actions that attempt to eliminate the cause of

the disillusionment.

While disillusionment is generally regarded as a step to maturity, one must first ask: what

is maturity? Is it the culmination of all of our experiences? Is it the lessons we learn from friends,

family, and the media? Is it our physical growth over our most important years? It is, in reality,

the understanding of our choices and why we react the way we do. While the two reactions of

resistance, from Holden and Seymour, and acceptance, from Mr. Smith and the author of “Christ

Climbed Down”, both have their merits, the eventual acceptance of disillusionment tends to lead

to maturity. Mr. Smith, for example, uses his acceptance as motivation for his efforts to change

the issues he sees. Holden, at the end of the novel, expresses his hopefulness for a bright future at

the end of The Catcher in the Rye after he accepted his disillusionment. However, Seymour’s

inability to come to terms with his experiences forced him to suicide. The Beat generation’s

inability to move on from their disillusionment forced them to become cynical heretics. The

reasons for why people make these decisions are inherent in their personalities. However, the
eventual decision to accept their disillusionment and to move on from it is a major factor in

happiness and maturity, for when people accept disillusionment as a step towards maturity, they

are able to grow and be successful in society.