The Catcher in the Rye

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Back Bay Books, 1951. Print.

This book is set in the 1950s, and is told from the perspective of Holden Caulfield, a sixteen-year-old boy, who is currently failing out his fourth high school, Pencey Prep, in Pennsylvania.  Holden is not stupid, but he finds himself uninterested in passing any subject but English.  He is annoyed with his teachers, and he often clashes with his roommates.  After a fight with a fellow student Stradlater over a girl, Jane, Holden decides to leave Pencey early before he has to face his parents who will be angry with him about dropping out again.

Holden sells personal belongings for cash and takes a train into Manhattan, where he plans to stay in a hotel and enjoy himself for a few days.  He has multiple strange and even violent encounters with people in the city (e.g. he hires a prostitute but doesn’t sleep with her and then gets beat up by her pimp).  Following this, he takes a girl, Sally, to the movies, but constantly thinks about another girl Jane.  After sharing his secret about dropping out again with his little sister, Holden ends the story with a plan to go home and eventually return to a new school.

I read this book for three reasons: I never got to read it in high school; I wanted to see what made it controversial; and finally, my grandparents used to read it together and they loved it.  I’m really glad I read this book when I did, because it reminds me so much of a good friend I had two years ago: Armand Duncan.  I hope Armand wouldn’t be mad about this, but he is exactly like Holden in many ways.  He’s polarizing, he’s difficult to get along with and please, he’s obsessed with other people’s personal habits, and above all he’s constantly concerned about whether other people are inauthentic or dishonest – in Holden’s terms, whether they are “phonies.”  This intensity of Holden’s character makes me miss my friend Armand.  I can’t wait to call him someday and talk about the book with him.

I have a difficult time finding anything offensive or ban-worthy in this book, other than the occasional curse word.  I suppose some religiously inclined people might interpret Holden as a deviant or something, but despite his past traumas (the loss of his brother and the suicide of his roommate), I find that Holden, much like Charlie in Perks, is an incredibly healthy-minded person in his own way.  In fact, I think this book raises excellent questions about what it means to be healthy.  And it also continually covers the theme of “phoniness,” which raises other interesting questions about social identities and performances.  These could be turned into great guiding questions for a book club in high school English.  If nothing else, I think many teenagers would relate to Holden's situation.  He gets pinned as a failure, and he is treated as damaged, but internally we often get to see the opposite.  This might really resonate with the experience many teenagers have in high school.  So, I would love to teach this book someday.