Melancholy, Salinger's Holden, and Pamuk's Pamuk

            Though of different continents, Orhan Pamuk in his memoir Istanbul resembled, at some points, Holden of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Most obviously, the two stories connect in their intention of cataloguing the coming-of-age of a young man--even more, a relatively rich, urban-dwelling young man. Though The Catcher in the Rye documents only a few days of Holden’s adolescent life and Istanbul tells of the first twenty-some years of Pamuk’s life, the two characters overlap in their disgust with “dishonesty” and “insincerity,” with the superficiality of their relationships (Pamuk 307). Pamuk admits his own part in the ruse: “With each of these friends I was different person, with a different sense of humor, a different voice, a different moral code” (311). For Holden, dissatisfaction with human relationships directly leads to his melancholy. And this sadness serves as the strongest similarity between the two books.

The sentiments the two men feel are not exactly the same: while Holden’s melancholy is strongly individual, Pamuk writes of his “confused, hazy state of melancholy . . . hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private” (89). However, this “cultural concept conveying worldly failure, listlessness, and spiritual suffering” felt by the people of Istanbul is transposed into the United States as disillusioned teenager Holden wanders the streets of New York City (91). Still, both Holden and Pamuk find a sort of contentment even in their states of sadness. Pamuk admits, “I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions” (35). Even more, hüzün is said to “bring us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a teakettle has been spouting steam on a winter’s day” (89). Similarly, it is therapeutic for Holden to roll around in his own melancholy for a while. He is finally able to feel peace as he sits in the pouring rain, watching his little sister ride a carousel: “I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all” (Salinger 275). After all, the hüzün is “ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating” (Pamuk 91).