The Catcher in the Rye

In J.D. Salinger's brilliant coming-of-age novel, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen year old prep school adolescent relates his lonely, life-changing twenty-four hour stay in New York City as he experiences the phoniness of the adult world while attempting to deal with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie and troubling sexual experiences.

Salinger, whose characters are among the best and most developed in all of literature has captured the eternal angst of growing into adulthood in the person of Holden Caulfield. Anyone who has reached the age of sixteen will be able to 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 has become one of the most beloved and enduring works in world literature.

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. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that can be loved and understood on many different levels of comprehension and each reader who experiences it will come away with a fresh view of the world in which they live.

A work of true genius, 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 the stroke of pure genius that is Salinger, himself, he wisely sums up the book's theme in its title.

When Holden, whose past has been traumatic, to say the least, is questioned by his younger sister, Phoebe, regarding what he would like to do when he gets older, Holden 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, 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.

Near the beginning of the book, Holden remembers a girl he once knew, Jane Gallagher, with whom he played checkers. Jane, he remembers, "wouldn't move any of her kings," and action Holden realizes to be a metaphor of her naivete. When Holden hears that his sexually experienced prep school roommate had a date with Jane, he immediately starts a fight with him, symbolically protecting Jane's innocence.

More sophisticated readers might question the reasons behind Holden's plight. 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, but trademark, 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. 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 alternately find Holden to be walking a fine line between witty sarcasm and dangerous cynicism. He is funny, there is no way around that, 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, the Egyptian wing of the museum, 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, not worth dealing with. His humor is sharp and witty and I often laugh out loud while reading, 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 finding Holden's journey to be a bit all over the place. I now 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 can not bring himself to alter this just as he can not 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. I can remember enjoying this book the first time I read it. But I had no idea that with each subsequent reading I would find more and more to enjoy, and more and more evidence of Salinger's genius.

I read Catcher in the Rye while on break from school. I'd heard many allusions to the book, and many people said they liked it, yet I didn't really know what it was about. It is fascinating, a true inspiration. Holden is so complex that you can't stop thinking about him when you're not reading. Salinger's amazing insights into human nature and his clever style of cynicism is unique to much of literature and better than all contemporary literature. As Holden starts to spiral down, you can't help but feel incredibly sad thinking about his situation. A boy, on the brink of breakdown, speaking of things that make so much sense. It makes you wonder if he's the one going crazy or if it's the way society is that is truly crazy. I will always love this book and I plan on going over it again to underline all the lines that I adored. For the people giving bad reviews, and as I've analyzed their comments, I must say that you missed the boat. I'm sure that you are the people that Holden is making his social critiques on. No symbolism, a boring character that is whining? Come again? Salinger's phrasing of his words is simplistic, but his message is not. Read it again, try and be more perceptive, and think harder about what is really being said. There is enlightenment waiting for you.

Time has not damaged this tome; it remains a sometimes harrowing, sometimes absorbing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes moving look into a mind in a state of disarray.

Others have written more "shocking" books or have been more overtly anti-social, but with The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger captures the bitterly confused mind of a youth who hates the whole world not because the world is worth hating, but because he's frustrated at his own inability to get along in that world, with such crisp reality that it shocks far more than any fantastical American Psycho.

Reading over the negative reviews on Amazon, I can't help but wonder how and why so many people are so unable to get it. The Catcher In The Rye is among the, if not the, most tangibly realistic looks into the mind of a disaffected, disillusioned youth suffering from depression (and a touch of the bipolar). The way Holden Caulfield's mind works is incredibly true to form - the contradictions, the hypocrisy, the confusion, the brief moments of sheer clarity followed by stretches of irrational thought. He thinks he's better than the world, and he thinks he's the lousiest person in the world at the same time. He wants everyone to go away and leave him alone, and he can't bear anyone, not even some schmuck he really dislikes (with good reason), to leave him. He's nothing but hypocrisy and contradictions and confusion. Salinger captures this in an amazing way.

People criticize the book because Caulfield is totally unlikable, a guy who rails against phonies when he himself is something of a phony ... but that's part of the point. Holden throws off all the signals someone in his situation actually throws off in real life, and just like real life, they're almost always ignored. Clearly this was a very, very autobiographical work for Salinger.

There are several moments when Caulfield, narrating in the first person, mentions offhandedly that he began to cry, he didn't know why, he felt like dying, and suddenly it went away and he felt invigorated with energy. It rings remarkably true. Who wrote this stuff with such honesty in 1951? Who tackled these issues, and in such a manner, in the 1950s?

The reason this has impact, though, is not simply because of the subject matter, not because of what Holden Caulfield is going through, and not because of the context of its time, but because Salinger never plays it for melodrama. He doesn't talk it up with purple prose or romanticize Caulfield's mentality or beat you over the head with ham-handed messages and platitudes. He neither makes Holden's mentality seem "cool" nor does he preach against Holden's attitude; he just says, "This is what it is." By presenting it in such a matter-of-fact manner, all in the first person, as if the narrator is simply telling you a story while having a few drinks, the whole thing is rooted in a very tangible, and therefore very disturbing, reality.

You and I KNOW Holden Caulfield. We've known that guy. And in The Catcher In The Rye, you get to peer inside his mind.

Even with dated references and slang and phrasings, I don't know that J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye will ever cease to be relevant and important.

Have you ever gotten fed up with the world? Have you ever just had enough of everybody's stupid, phony attitudes and this tainted game that we call life? You feel like you're all alone, there's no one that will listen to you, and the ones that do turn out to be perverts and phonies. Are they all crazy, or is it me?

This is the attitude that Holden Caulfield, a disgruntled 16 year-old, takes toward life. He's just flunked out of another school, his younger brother Allie is dead, he's a virgin, and to top it all off, everyone around him is a phony. Holden is alone in this superficial, corrupt world he lives in.

What amazes me most about A Catcher in the Rye is it's incredibly controversial beginnings when it was first published. The book took place and was published in the 1940's, and society was based on being right and proper. Things like hollow conversation 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 uprising in society, and was stereotyped as "evil" and "insignificant" by the common "phony" book reviewer of the time. Even serial killers were found with the book on them. Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, was found with the book in his pocket after the crime. As you can imagine this didn't help the situation at all.

In the real world, evil was personified as Holden Caulfield. People reacted to the book just as people reacted to Holden in the novel. Holden was considered a rebellious, ungrateful, disrespectful teenager that, although rare, is a worldwide epidemic. But if you see past the narrow-minded view that people tend to look through, the book is a testament that this rebellious teenager is a person. The book shows that Holden, although a sarcastic, nasty, unlikable guy, is a person inside who is just trying to save the virtue of innocence.

Holden sees the world as perverted and narrow, and has a nervous breakdown when he sees innocent children about to fall of the cliff. This cliff is a thought of Holden's of which he states when asked what he wants to be when he grows up. Holden says that he wants to be a catcher in the rye. He envisions children playing on a field of rye, and next to this field there's a cliff. Holden would catch the children if they didn't look where they were going and accidentally ran off the cliff. 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*** 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 in which he thought was innocent and pure turned out to be "given the time" 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 worse part was that Holden was, self-admittedly, too "yellow-belly" to do anything about these things. A boy lost in a sick world, helpless to its evil, and yet Holden's the crazy one? Holden speaks the brutal truth, and 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.

A key factor that made this book enjoyable was the style in which its monologue was written. This book is definitely not an English teacher's dream when it comes to grammar, sentence structure, etc. But the dialect, risqué even by today's standards, conveys a feeling of reality that is not obtainable by any other literary device I know of. Holden's sarcasm, humorous attitude, and flat out bluntness had me laughing page after page. This line, chosen at random, demonstrates Holden's attitude and dialect, "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."

So why is A Catcher in the Rye a great book? I think what makes a great book great is its ability to communicate with the reader. Every teenager I know can easily relate to Holden Caulfield's situation. The book is a comfort if you're a teen feeling the same things as Holden, criticizing the world and its occupants. Holden Caulfield is a hero that wasn't afraid to speak his mind. He taught me that your criticisms of the world are not invalid, and that there is nothing that you can say that is so bad that you have to repress it. Holden made me feel a little less alone. He made me feel like there were others in this predicament that we call adolescence.