Does Mr.

Antolini In “The Catcher In The Rye” Gives Good Advices To Today’s

Teenagers?

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause while the mark of the
mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." says Mr. Antolini, who is a character in the
book “Catcher In The Rye” written by J.D. Salinger and published in year 1951. Mr. Antolini is
Holden’s favorite teacher and he constantly gives advices to Holden about life. Because of that, the
relationship between Holden and Mr. Antolini gets better day by day until the point that Mr. Antolini
strokes Holden’s hair while he was asleep, which Holden considers a sort of homosexual action.

Overall, it can be said that Mr. Antolini gave useful advices to Holden Caufield in the course of
time. However, there is a question remaining in today’s readers’ minds: Are these advices are still
current and valid or not? To be honest, I think that his advices are still beneficial for us. In the
following, I would like to discuss about this attention-seeking topic and explain you the reasons why I
think that the pro arguments about the currency and beneficialness of Mr. Antolini’s advices
outweigh the cons.

Beginning with the cons, it can be said that Mr. Antolini might have been acting “phony”, despite
the fact that Holden described him the opposite way. It can be interpreted that Mr. Antolini was
acting as a professional “phony” so that no one managed to understand that he was actually a
“phony”, even our smart-ass Holden Caufield couldn’t manage to do so. As a conclusion of that, it can
be said that his advices were not coming from the heart and were said just to mess around. Some
people may find that his advices were specifically for Holden and not addressed to everyone, just to
gain Holden’s confidence in order to come on to him as it’s also guessed that Mr. Antolini might be
having different sexual preferences, meaning that he might be homosexual. This leads us to the
result that Mr. Antolini’s advices were only fudge and were said just to get closer to Holden.

In contrast to that, it is obvious that even these advices, which some people find insincere and
phony, have some very important thoughts in them. He gives him a whole smattering of advice: How
education is really, in the end, worth the time; how Holden should find what he's passionate about as
it'll prevent him from a fall and why people should also act with their feelings and emotions during
important moments of decisions. In my opinion, although even Mr. Antolini can be considered
“phony”, he gives Holden quite important facts about life and contributes to the search of Holden
about finding himself. Holden takes a big step to the way of becoming an adult with the help of Mr.
Antolini’s advices. The advices he gave him did not get pressed for time and because of that Mr.
Antolini manages to appeal to today’s teenagers as well due to the fact that education, change of
time and finding oneself are unconditional, meaning that these issues were important 100 years ago,
are important today and will probably be important 100 years later.

To wrap up, I want to tell that even though I don’t find Mr. Antolini a very sincere and honest
person, his advices managed to keep up with the time and can appeal to today’s teenagers and may
probably have impacts on them as the topics he talked about all the time are still considered very
important. These advices might be pretty useful for teenagers to shape their personalities and
identities because these advices may have the ability to impact the consciousness and direct
teenagers’ lives to somewhere else.