Book Review: "The Catcher in the Rye"

About the Author:
J D Salinger

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City in 1919. Apparently, many events from Salinger’s early life appear in The Catcher in the Rye. He too spent his youth being shuttled between various prep schools before his parents finally settled on the Valley Forge Military Academy

Though controversial, the novel appealed to a great number of people. Salinger’s writing seemed to tap into the emotions of readers in an unprecedented way. Salinger's Holden seemed to stand for young people everywhere, who felt themselves beset on all sides by pressures to grow up and live their lives according to the rules, to disengage from meaningful human connection, and to restrict their own personalities and conform to a bland cultural norm. Many readers see Holden Caulfield as a symbol of pure, unfettered individuality in the face of cultural oppression.

About the Book:

Holden Caulfield, a troubled teenager, narrates the novel from a psychiatric facility a few months after the events of the novel, with his tone varying between disgust, cynicism, bitterness, and nostalgic longing.

He fears and does not know how to deal with conflict, confusion, and change, and avoids to deal with complexities of the world around him. He feels alienated, alone and victimized as though the whole world was against him.

You sense a major conflict within Holden’s psyche. One Part wants to connect with other people on an adult level, while other wants to reject the adult world as “phony,” and to always retreat into his own memories of childhood. He is constantly retreating to alienation as a form of self-protection; dealing with the painfulness of growing up and his presumed phoniness of the adult world.

At the beginning of the novel, Holden’s sense of disadvantage and corresponding bitterness seem somewhat strange, given his circumstances: he’s clearly a bright boy from a privileged New York family. As the book progresses, however, we learn that Holden has built a cynical psychological armor around himself to protect himself from the complexities of the world.

Through this Catcher in the rye fantasy you see different sides of him very evident, one side reflects his innocence, belief in pure, uncorrupted youth, his desire to protect it and on the flip side it also shows his extreme disconnection from the reality and his naïve view of the world.

Quotes :

" 'Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.'
'Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.'
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game. "

As Spencer, Holden's teacher lectures him about the importance of playing by the rules. The conversation succinctly illuminates key aspects of Holden’s character. We see his silent contempt for adults, which is evidenced by the silent ridiculing and cursing of Spencer that Holden hides beneath his nodding, compliant veneer.

"The best thing, though, 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."

As Holden enters the museum he has visited as a kid on his school trips, he realizes how the displays' remain completely unchanged, and it troubles him how he changes each time he returns. The museum presents him with a vision of life he can understand: it is frozen, silent, and always the same. They represent the simple, idealistic, manageable vision of life that Holden wishes he could live.

". . . 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. "

When Holden's little sister asks him what he wanted to do in life, he responds with this image, it reveals his fantasy of idealistic childhood and how he would be a protector of the innocence. We also get another glimpse of how Holden prefers to retreat into his own imaginary view of the world rather than deal with the reality around him. He acknowledges that his idea is “crazy,” yet he cannot come up with anything more pragmatic; he has trouble seeing the world in any other way. Revealing the oversimplification of his worldview.