J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has always been a controversial novel – both reviled and celebrated in equal measure. Sundry guardians of morality and upright behaviour, whom Holden Caulfield - the book’s angst-ridden teenage protagonist – would probably have called ‘phonies’, have always panned the book for its disturbing themes of sexuality and its use of obscene language. Still, the book is among the most read in American schools. Though it was meant for adults, it finds great resonance among adolescents due to the subject, conversational tone and language which reflects a teenager’s vocabulary almost perfectly. Salinger boasted in college that he would write the defining American novel someday. He did not miss the mark by much.

It is essentially the story of an adolescent who faces struggles as he grows up in this imperfect world. Once Holden leaves the sheltered environs of his home for those prep schools that purportedly make something of teenagers, he sees things he cannot understand. Why people act as they do, he probably asks himself. Why does someone behave so snottily when you have probably never met him before? Why is money such a cause for resentment even among kids? The list could be endless. Holden is himself a caring, kind and honest boy before he goes to these schools. That makes it difficult for him to see what adult life is all about. He flunks schools out of this apathy to the ways of the world. Most teachers and students are ‘phonies’ to him, his ultimate insult to people who are contrived or conceited in their behaviour. When the book starts, Holden is flunking yet another school - Pency Prep – and this time he decides to leave without a word to anybody. He makes for New York, his hometown, but does not want to go home yet. So he checks into a rundown hotel and thinks he’ll have a vacation before heading home to face his parents’ inevitable wrath. Only, he spends the time drinking and feeling so alienated that he’s badly depressed most of the time. He has an encounter he did not want with a prostitute, which finally ends without much action and with some regret. He meets up with a girl he has known in the past, but he’s fed up even there. He encounters three women in a bar who are among the most bizarre characters you would ever see. The whole world seems to him to be full of phonies. There are two nuns he meets at the Grand Central station in NY and he donates some money to them. They are probably the only ones he thinks are genuine of all those people he meets during his little getaway. Holden has a little sister Phoebe, who is very perceptive and intelligent. She is the only person he really likes. He turns so morose now that he wants to sneak in to his home and see Phoebe late at night. She’s very happy and animated to see him but also guesses the reason why he’s there. During their talk, he confesses to her that the only thing he wants in his life is to be like a Catcher in the Rye, someone who stands at the edge of some cliff and catches children who stray close to it while playing in the rye. It’s only a metaphor for a person who wants to save himself from impending adulthood, which he thinks is akin to falling off a cliff.

He and his siblings are all good at English; it’s the one subject he does not fail. So he has an English teacher Mr. Antolini he likes who he goes to after seeing Phoebe. He gives Holden a place to stay overnight and also gives him advice on life. He says to Holden, “you are not the first person to be confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour” and then he tells him to try to engage with the world. It’s all perfunctory to Holden, who, on a fancy, decides next morning that he’ll leave everything behind to live a solitary existence in the woods, doing menial jobs to survive and allowing only people he likes to visit him. He tells Phoebe about it, but she is adamant about going with him. It probably makes him see some sense and he decides that he would stick it out and see what happens. The ending does not offer any fixes to life’s problems and Holden himself is probably unsure about his future. But he ‘thinks he will apply himself’ in his next school. That perhaps makes the novel stand out as more gritty and realistic than other works on teenage delinquents.
We are all pristine early in our lives, untouched by the ugly realities of life and the need to adapt. But as you grow up, you have to deal with all kinds of people, many of whom you don’t like. The whole business of life is such that it cannot be attempted without adapting yourself. The book shows this aspect of human life, how humans become indifferent towards others and only think of themselves, how they tend to be conceited and shallow as they mature into adults. Life makes people like that. It makes youngsters like Holden become frustrated, alienated from the world and leads to the existential angst that people talk of in teenagers.

A final word on the literary style of the novel: Salinger intuited that the best way to make Holden believable would be to write from his own perspective. The novel uses a style called the Stream of Consciousness, where a person’s thoughts are one with the narrative. So even an aside such as when he describes how the Ossenburger dorm room makes him feel tell us a great deal about him and enhance the incisiveness of the novel. His use of teenage colloquialisms used in the 1940s NY sets the tone and frequent profanities only light up various facets of Holden’s character, like the word ‘goddam’ which underlines his dislike for something when used in that sense. Overall, it sets the feel of the unfolding of a teenage story, told from his perspective.