I finished readin J.D. Salinger’s novel about three weeks ago (pleasure reading) and I have to say I thought it was a great book.
That aside, I would like to explain a little hobby of mine. After reading a book or playing a video game (regardless of if I liked it or not) I like going to Amazon.com and reading customer reviews on the product. I enjoy reading other’s opinions on something that I also have an opinion on.
Well I was in for quite a surprise at amazon.com for The Catcher in the Rye. The book has just over 2000 reviews there, all ranging from “excellent novel” to “vulgar trash.” Reading through some of the “vulgar trash” reviews, I would have to say there is a large body of people, conservate or liberal, educated or not so educated, that don’t seem to get the book. Or at least I get that impression.
Anyhow, what do you think of the novel? What were its strong points and weak points? I would like to know.
I hate Catcher in the Rye. I’m not offended by the content, but it really had no relevance, I made no connections with Holden and just wanted it to be over. I found his teenage angst the most painful thing to read and I spent the whole time wanted to slap him and tell him to grow up and get over it.
I don’t own a copy anymore, so I can’t talk about strong or weak points within the book (that, and it’s been a number of years since I read it), and the experience was so painful to me that I wouldn’t even check it out of the library to re-read it.
Yeah, I remember “teen angst” being an argument against the book as well. Frankly, I don’t think Holden really had any teen angst in the way that most teens have some kind of angsty resentment against society or their parents, but rather I think Holden had a keen way of observing, and most of the time he didn’t care for the kind of people that he saw. For example, he thought the ivy league students were just ordinary people (and they really are) who have this kind of superficial (phony, if you will) act they always carry with them. Holden simply didn’t like the high-brow nature of the enlightened or highly-educated behavior of some people.
Just because one doesn’t like the book, doesn’t mean one doesn’t “get it.” My friend always pulls that crap when I don’t like one of the movies, books or TV shows he loves.
That said, Catcher in the Rye is easily one of the best first-person narratives in the English language. Fluidity of imagery and cohesiveness of voice abound. If you’re looking for a stylistic example of a great first-person narrative, look here.
However, the novel suffers from the same problem much contemporary fiction does, in that it takes itself way too seriously. Yes, everyone has problems, and yes, everyone feels lonely, but no, not everyone pisses and moans and hates the world like Holden. This is why the novel is so appealing to young people. They (generally) have no idea what “real life” is about.
I once wrote a paper, however, that the entire novel is supposed to be ironic. Salinger is making (very) subtle fun of Holden and his dream of being a “Catcher in the Rye.” I think there’s way more ways to “get it” than perhaps you think.
[quote] Originally posted by Dostromin I would have to say there is a large body of people, conservate or liberal, educated or not so educated, that don’t seem to get the book. Or at least I get that impression.
“Large body” as in not everyone and “Or at least I get that impression.” as in there are some in the general body of people who wrote bad (as in this book was bad) reviews who do get the book that appear to me that they do NOT get the book.
That aside, how do you suppose that Salinger is subtly making fun of Holden? Not to mention that I do not think that Holden hated the world. He loved his sister, he liked going to the park and the museum there. He liked his older brother (although he did not like his occupation) and so on and so forth.
I didn’t hate it. I found reading it at least somewhat enjoyable until it ended abruptly and I was left wondering what I was supposed to get out of that. I always wished I had had it assigned to me in a class so that I could walk through it with a teacher and find out what the point was.
Eh, I think the point was, above all else, to just show how some aspects of life and of society or certain institutions are abstract or simply worthless. For example, the whole bit about how Pency ‘molds boys’ when in reality they never did any molding of any sort. Another example, when he has the prostitute in his motel room and he thinks of when she purchased her green dress. How it was a nice dress, and the salesmen must have thought she was some elegant young woman who was buying the dress for a special occaision when in face she was going out to sell herself in that dress.
Also, remember, the story takes place from between when Holden left Pency and when he arrived in California, so yeah the story is going to be short.
It is my opinion that the direct theme of the story, if any at all, is veiled from the readers with the intend that each person will interperet the story however they will.
I’ve read it 3 times. The first was when I was in a boarding school that had advertisement leaflets and such showing strapping young boys wearing their crested blazers and doing very upright, manly things. They promised to mold us young lads in to upstanding, strong young men. It was a nightmare. It was an unbelievably cold and alone place, and it was more like a prison than anything. Beatings and sexual humiliation were a constant backdrop, as the older boys that they left in charge of showing us how to be good prep-schoolers like them were more interested in letting everyone know that they had the power to do whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted at all times. Rape wasn’t unheard of and yes, I was a victim. The assistant headmaster was also a known (among the students) pedophile, and he abused and exploited boys placed in his care there for about 25 years before a parent finally demanded an investigation during my time there. He was arrested promptly when they saw his basement wallpapered in pictures of boys in compromising poses. There wasn’t a student on that campus that had taken a class from him and not seen the inside of that basement. Nobody wanted to listen, they thought it was all exaggeration. It wasn’t.
You can see how at that point I was pretty sympathetic to Holden’s assesment of that system, and of the whole world. I found in Holden an escape, and it reassured me that out in the real world, people knew what it was like. I wasn’t alone.
The second time was later in High School. That was the first time I picked up on the “falling” metaphor - i.e. growing up. I still believe that this is really the center of the book’s message. It’s the story of finding your adult self during your adolescence. It doesn’t mean that you’re instantly mature and responsible, but at some point you just abandon your notions of fairness and rightness and the way things should be, and learn to find some measure of contentment in the way things are. There’s nothing you can do to make the transition easy, or to help it come faster, but when it does, there’s such a relief.
I read it again recently, now that I’m in the summer before I’ll be going off to college, and I basically stick with my previous assesment. It’s a brilliant story about what it feels like to be stuck between childhood and adulthood out in the real world.
I loved it. I had a few classmates who asked (or their parents asked for them) to be given an alternate reading assignment because of the language in the book. That really made me angry, that someone could focus on the realistic language of the book and miss its whole point.
That aside, I think the book is about a lot of things-for me it’s about how a young man was screwed over by his parents, his school, and, in a way, his older brother and screwed up in his adolesence. I think the people “just wanted to slap Holden” have a limited understanding of pyschology and the reality of teen depression. I also loved how his dead brother and his very-much-alive little sister stood for symbols of innocence, proving that he didn’t in fact “hate the world” but that he could see through the phoniness of things because he’d been swamped with it his whole life.
Read it back in high school under duress, didn’t get much out of it besides a grade but just recently was thinking about re-reading it, some minor aspects that I remember are calling to me.
There are a number of threads pertaining to Catcher, so you might do a search, Dostromin - one obvious one is here where Superdude asks Dopers to convince him to keep reading and a number of folks offer their pros and cons.
Bottom line, IMHO?
Regardless of what we as indivduals thinks of Catcher, it has entered the “modern canon” and therefore is a classic, much the same way that To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch-22 are classics the modern era. (I actually started a thread about modern era classics within the past month you could search for…). Now, whether it will remain a classic - on the short list for the era, if you will - only time will tell…
Why is it a classic? A few reasons:
It is one of the earliest post-WWII books that document the emergence of the Teenager as a character worthy of consideration and merit. Before that, teens weren’t acknowledged to the same degree. This coincided with the emergence of rock n’ roll and James Dean. So for its time, Catcher validates Teenagers.
It’s voice - Salinger’s first-person narrative does a reasonable, if not really great, job of capturing a teen’s stream-of-consciousness, pinballing between deep thoughts, Big Questions regarding personal direction, and silly-ass immature stuff.
It’s moment - as Lucki Chaarms stated:
Holden can see that he is growing up and needs to choose a direction, but sees that every choice he might make demands a form of compromise, and he feels that everyone who has compromised is somehow a “phony” so he is paralyzed by the choice he is confronted by. If that ain’t teen angst, I don’t know what is…
So for all of those reasons, and I am sure there are more, Catcher is a classic. Personally I would rate it as a pretty well-written short story/novella, but not in a league with a number of other great books - it captures an interesting moment in a character’s life with an accurate voice - but that’s about it…
I teach Catcher in the Rye, which means I’ve read it aloud 8 times in its entirety, so I feel I know it pretty well. The point of the novel is not that Holden hates society, or that teenagers are whiny, or that prep schools suck. The point is that after watching his beloved younger brother Allie die painfully of cancer, Holden lost his childhood innocence. As a result, he has a hard time seeing the purpose behind such pursuits as going to school and eventually getting a “real” job, can’t manage to enjoy the simplest things in life, and in general wants to turn away from adult society. He has come to equate the “fall” into adulthood with death; as a result, the only people he can stand are children. He wishes he could protect them all from the crushing sorrow that adulthood brought to him, and wishes to preserve the perceived utopian state of childhood for little kids.
It’s actually very sad to see how an intelligent, sensitive person like Holden could become so bitter, cynical, and lost. It seems to me that all of the adults in his life have failed him because no one comforted him or helped him cope with his grief over Allie. His parents packed him off to boarding school, no one attempts to reach out to him to find out WHY he’s so unable to function normally. That’s why he has a nervous breakdown, IMO.
As you can probably tell, I’m on the side of CitR as classic.
Classic. I was young when I first read and I didn’t really get a lot of what was going on. I really felt for Holden in the beginning when his roommate was telling Holden about that girl. I thought Salinger did a great job portraying a teenager. I don’t know and don’t care what kind of teenager Holden was supposed to be, I guess thats a benifit in reading a book like this early in life.
When he pointed out that his roommate thinks Holden is a better because he puts all the commas in the right place, that just stuck with me. When he was in the hotel room looking around and then he saw that pretty girl and he said something about protecting a girl’s face if she was pretty, I always think of that whenever I meet a girl with a pretty face. And when Holden finds FUCK written in the school and he rubs it off, then the little story he predicts will happen if he doesn’t or didn’t erase it. Thanks to that, I erase curse words whenever I find them.
I really didn’t (and still don’t) get why people think it’s so great. I read it for, um, 9th or 10th english, so that might have prejudiced me slightly against it, but still…I just didn’t feel any connection at all to anything in the book.
I like the book, and it’s probably one of my favorit books, but yeah, I think after the first few chapters I began not to like Holden at all. He seemed whiney. But I still think it’s one of my favorite books.
I think reading it in a high school setting helps one like the book more. I mean I know I did, and just seeing the F-bomb in there I was like “hey this is great!” I don’t think his teen angst is a Linkin Park scream and shout kind of angst; there’s intelliegence to why he is mad, which makes the book VERY enjoyable to me, imho.