In J.D. Salinger's brilliant coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen year old prep school adolescent relates his lonely, life-changing twenty-four hour stay in New York as he experiences the phoniness of the adult world while attempting to deal with the death of his younger brother.
Salinger, whose characters are among the best and most developed in American literature has captured the eternal angst of growing into adulthood in the character Holden Caulfield. Any American who has reached the age of sixteen or more should easily identify with this unique and yet universal character, for Holden contains bits and pieces of all of us. It is for this very reason that The Catcher in the Rye became and has remained one of the most beloved and enduring works in American and world literature. Told as a monologue, The Catcher in the Rye not only describes Holden's thoughts and activities throughout these few days, but it also goes back into his past. He describes some of his true friends, how his parents and childhood were, and gives reasons for his actions. (Like deciding not to have sex with a prostitute.) During the short period covered in the novel, Holden experiences a nervous breakdown, a result of his unexplained depression, impulsive spending and generally odd, erratic behavior. However, life continues on around Holden as it always has, with the majority of people ignoring the changes that occur in him- until it begins to get them seriously ticked off. Progressively through the novel we are challenged to think about society's attitude to the human condition, and to ask “Does society have an 'ostrich in the sand' mentality, a deliberate ignorance of the emptiness that can characterize human existence?” And if so, when Holden begins to probe and investigate his own sense of emptiness and isolation, before finally declaring that the world is full of 'phonies' with each one out for their own phony gain, is he actually the one who is going insane, or is it society which has lost it's mind for failing to see the hopelessness of its own existence? As always, Salinger's writing is so brilliant, his characters so real, that he need not employ artifice of any kind. This is a study of the complex problems haunting all adolescents as they mature into adulthood and Salinger wisely chooses to keep his narrative and prose straightforward and simple. This is not to say that The Catcher in the Rye is a straightforward and simple book. It is anything but. In it we are privy to Salinger's genius and originality in portraying universal problems in a unique manner. Images of a catcher in the rye are abundantly apparent throughout this book. While analyzing the city raging about him, Holden's attention is captured by a child walking in the street "singing and humming." Realizing that the child is singing the familiar refrain, "If a body meet a body, comin' through the rye," Holden, himself, says that he feels not so depressed." The title's words, however, are more than just a pretty ditty that Holden happens to like. In a stroke of pure genius Salinger wisely sums up the book's theme in its title. When Holden, whose past has been very traumatic, to say the least, is questioned by his younger sister, Phoebe, as to what he would like to do when he gets older, he replies, "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do is, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be." In this short bit of dialogue Salinger brilliantly exposes Holden's deepest desire and expounds the book's theme. Holden wishes to preserve something of childhood innocence that gets hopelessly lost as we grow into the crazy and phony world of adulthood. The theme of lost innocence is deftly explored by Salinger throughout the book. Holden is appalled when he encounters profanity scrawled on the walls of Phoebe's school, a school that he envisions protecting and shielding children from the evils of society. When Holden gives his red hunting cap to Phoebe to wear, he gives it to her as a shield, an emblem of the eternal love and protectiveness he feels for her. While Holden's feelings are universal, this character does seem to be a rather extreme example. The catalyst for Holden's desires is no doubt the death of his younger brother, Allie, a bright and loving boy who died of leukemia at the age of thirteen. Holden still feels the sting of Allie's death acutely, as well as his own, albeit undeserved, guilt, in being able to do nothing to prevent Allie's suffering. The only reminder Holden has of Allie's shining but all-too-short life, is Allie's baseball mitt which is covered with poems Allie read while standing in the outfield. In a particularly poignant moment, Holden tells us that this is the glove he would want to use to catch children when they fall from the cliff of innocence. In an interesting Salinger twist, Holden distorts the Robert Burns poem that provides the book's title. Originally, it read, "If a body meet a body, comin' through the rye." Holden distorts the word "meet" into "catch." This is certainly not the first time Holden is guilty of distortion; indeed he is a master at it. This distortion, however, shows us how much Allie's death has affected Holden and also how much he fears his own fall from innocence, the theme that threads its way throughout the whole of the book. By this amazing book's end, we must reach the conclusion that there are times when we all need a "catcher in the rye." We are, indeed, blessed if we have one. It is difficult to remember what it was like to read this book for the first time when I was 16. It is also difficult to imagine a book where each new reading provides so much more illumination into the main character and his personality. I can remember finding Catcher to be funny the first time I read it. I now find Holden to be walking a fine line between witty sarcasm and dangerous cynicism. He is funny, of course, but his belittling nature also causes him to dismiss much from his life that may not be perfect, but should be included. There is nothing that he, in the end, does not dismiss as being phony, whether it is the nuns, with whom he shares a cup of coffee, the teacher at the end, who most likely was just trying to help, Pheobe's school...everything. As soon as one little detail slips in which is not completely on track with what he is thinking, whatever it is he is contemplating becomes useless, “phony,” and not worth dealing with. His humor is sharp and witty and I often laugh out loud while reading the book, but it is also an easy way for him to detach himself from a world which he no longer feels he belongs in, or wants to belong in. I can remember finding the ending ambiguous the first time I read it. I now see it as the only way it could end, with Holden finding happiness watching his sister Pheobe going forever in circles, and being able to pretend that that is never going to change. She is the one thing in his life which he still deems worthy of existence, and placing her on a merry-go-round is his best attempt to keep her there. Things change and grow and move on, but Holden refuses to accept this and is yearning to stop things forever where they are, to go back to when D.B. was a writer full of dreams and Allie was still alive. He mentions once how he used to take field trips to the museum, but how it was never the same and that takes something away from it. Even if the exhibit was the same, YOU would be different, simply by having traveled a bit farther in life, and this is what Holden is incapable of dealing with. The ending is Holden trying to keep the one thing in his life he still truly loves exactly the way she is. I can remember when I first read the novel finding Holden's journey somewhat confusing. But now I can see that there is not a single detail which Salinger does not use to illuminate Holden. On Holden's last night at school everything is covered with snow. He stands there holding a snowball looking for something to throw it at, but he can not bring himself to throw his snowball and disturb a fire hydrant or a park bench. Everything is peaceful under the snow and Holden cannot bring himself to alter this tranquil scene, just as he cannot handle a world that keeps changing. Or there is Holden's history class, which he is failing. The only topic he is remotely interested in is the Egyptians and their process of mummification. The only thing he cares about is how to preserve things just as they are. Holden sees the world as perverted and narrow, and has a nervous breakdown when he imagines that he sees innocent children about to fall off a cliff. This cliff is an image in Holden’s troubled mind. This imaginary cliff is situated near a field of rye on which he envisions children playing. Holden would catch the children if they didn't look where they were going and accidentally ran towards the cliff where they were in danger of falling off. There is incredible symbolism in this statement. The children represent childhood innocence and purity. The cliff, or what lies below it, represents the tainted, impure "game" of life, in which so many people have fallen. These people, the "phonies," are what Holden despises most. Holden demonstrates his desire to save innocence when he finds that someone's written "f...k you" on a schoolhouse wall. "I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them- all cockeyed, naturally- what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days." Holden rubbed the mark off, and felt extreme hatred toward the person who wrote it. Holden hated everything. Everything he held sacred turned out to be a disappointment. A girl he thought was innocent and pure turned out to be being screwed by a suave roommate of his. Another girl whom he dated was such a phony it almost made him vomit. He gets roughed up when a disgruntled pimp comes around to collect more than Holden owed for a prostitute whom he didn't even have sex with. An old teacher that finally understood where Holden was coming from turns out to be a pervert when he's found patting Holden's head in the middle of the night. Nothing sacred and nothing pure, and the worst part was that Holden was, self-admittedly, too "yellow-belly" to do anything about these things. He was a boy lost in a sick world, helpless to confront its evil, and yet Holden's viewed as the crazy one? Holden speaks the brutal truth, And he admires others who do. For example, Holden said that he really admired this kid, James, that Holden knew, who said that another kid, Phil, was a conceited jerk. Phil was much bigger, and he and six other jerks went into scrawny James' room and beat him up, wanting him to take back his comments. James never took it back, but instead, decided to jump out a window to his death. Considering how it became in instant classic with teenage readers soon after it came out, because there was nothing like it available to them, what amazes me most about A Catcher in the Rye is it's incredibly controversial reception when it was first published. The book took place and was published in the 1940's, and society then was based on everything being right and proper. Things like hollow, empty conversations conducted ritually just for the sake of conversing defined what Holden held as "phony". Holden hated phonies with a passion, and throughout the book made brutal, dead-on observations about the world which were stated in crude dialect. This caused much criticism in polite society when the book came out, and “Catcher” was stereotyped as "evil" and "insignificant" by many of the common ("phony") book reviewers of the time. Even serial killers were caught with the book on them. Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, was found with a copy of the book in his pocket after the crime. As you can imagine this didn't help Salinger’s situation at all. Evil was personified in the eyes of some readers by the book’s main character, Holden himself, and in the 1940s people reacted to the novel as a whole just as they reacted to the novel’s protagonist. Holden was considered a rebellious, ungrateful, disrespectful teenager that seemed to represent a growing worldwide epidemic. But if you can see past the narrow-minded views of the psychologically uneducated ignorant majority of the reading public in the 1940s, you will realize that this book was--and is--an expression and testament of the experience of adolescence itself and that the fictional character Holden Caulfield became a spokesperson for many angry, alienated, disillusioned frustrated, and rebellious teenagers and has been ever since. The book shows that Holden, although seemingly a rough-edged sarcastic, nasty, and unlikable guy, is really a person much like anyone else, a young man who is just trying to save his own sense of justice and innocence. One thing that made “Catcher” particularly enjoyable to me was the style in which Salinger presented Holden’s monologue. Holden’s “voice” has stayed with me ever after and even when writing my memoirs now at 75 years old I still find myself tempted to lapse into Holdenese. It’s so damned funny! I admit, this book is definitely not an English teacher's dream when it comes to grammar, sentence structure, etc. But the dialect, often quite risqué even by today's standards, conveys a feeling of reality that is not obtainable by any other literary device I know. Holden's sarcasm, humorous attitude, and flat out bluntness has me laughing page after page every time I read it. This line, chosen at random, demonstrates Holden's attitude and his particular voice: "You should've seen the way they said “Hello”. You'd have thought they hadn't seen each other in twenty years. You'd have thought they'd taken baths in the same bathtub or something when they were little kids. Old buddyroos. It was nauseating. The funny part was, they probably met each other just once, at some phony party. Finally, when they were all done slobbering around, old Sally introduced me." There are several moments when Holden, narrating his story in the first person, mentions offhandedly that he recalled a time not long ago when he began to cry uncontrollably --he didn't know why--and that he just felt like dying, like killing himself--and then suddenly these disturbing thoughts and feelings just vanished and instead, he felt elated, invigorated with pulsing new bursts of energy. This almost phenomenological account of his bi-polar mood swings rings remarkably true as we read this now, but what writers wrote about this stuff with such honesty then in 1951? Who tackled these issues, and in such a manner, even a decade later? So why is A Catcher in the Rye a great novel? I think what makes a novel really great is its ability to communicate subtly with the reader’s deepest emotions, desires, and fears, whether these are conscious or unconscious. The reason this novel still has such a universal and irresistible appeal especially to Young Adult readers and impacts our unconscious minds and feelings today just as much as it did when it was originally published in 1951 is because it gives a voice to that inarticulate wounded brooding silent and/or silenced despairing yet still hopeful contradictory inner adolescent inside all of us. Others have written more "shocking" books or have been more overtly anti-social, but with The Catcher In The Rye, Salinger captured the bitterly confused and resentment-filled mind of a youth who hates the whole world, not because the world itself is worth hating as such, but because he is so uncomfortable in himself, frustrated at his own impotence to change anything outside while his own bodymind is changing seemingly unpredictably and uncontrollably from within, and at his inability to get along in the ault world, expressed with such crisp language and astute, right-on, in-your-face observations that it shocks readers even today far more than any fantastical American Psycho movie ever could. When I first read Catcher in 1951, like millions of other teenage readers, I could identify completely with Holden’s squinting ascerbic attitude, as I did later in my freshman year at Duke in 1954 when I discovered and read Dostoevsky’s bizare portrayal of the alienated Underground Man who served as another spokesperson for my confused and mixed feelings of ressentiment, and then in the 1960s Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf another literary character became my spokesperson expressing for me views and feelings I hadn’t yet dared bring fully into my ego consciousness and own as my own. Holden made me feel like there were other adolescents in this world who thought and felt much like as I did. So perhaps I was so not unique, after all!! I was impressed with Holden as a teen who wasn't afraid to speak his mind. He taught me that even if you’re only 14 or 15, your criticisms of the world are often justified and valid. And in the end, Holden made me feel a little less alone. He was another “imaginary friend” I found I could add to my imaginary support system, my family of choice in a hostile untrustworthy world.
