Salinger: Catcher in the Rye

Discuss your thoughts here on J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

To start things off...
It is definitely one of those books that people either love or hate and has come under great debate. There's a thread in a group debating what books should be included in the high school curriculum and there has been just as much praise for this book as there has been scorn.

Personally, I think it has become outdated and no longer needs to be taught in a high school forum.

Thoughts?

No, I don't think it's outdated. A classic by definition doesn't really become outdated. It is news that stays news, in the words of Pound.

Whether high school students should read it is another question. So many of the books read in high school get unappreciated or misinterpreted or both. School ruins many books and authors for us. I suppose the assumption is that because the novel features a teenager, then it must be read by teenagers. But it's a serious book dealing with serious matters that transcend teen angst. It can be grim and it has a grim ending, so I can understand why some teachers would not want to teach it. Students who identify too closely with Holden Caulfield probably ought to keep in mind where he winds up in the end.

It's been a few years since I read The Catcher in the Rye and I was not overly impressed with this classic. Maybe it was because I came to the book with an adult perspective but I just found Holden Caulfield unlikeable and not particularly interesting. Perhaps I should give it a reread.

I rarely understand the contention that a classic novel is "outdated." Kids read all sorts of 19th century literature in school, too, with places and customs and moral values that are alien to our modern world in varying degrees. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be reading 19th century lit.

Deniro hits the nail on the head: "it's a serious book dealing with serious matters that transcend teen angst." So many readers--teachers, students, kids, adults--seem to miss this fact. Normal teen angst does not land one in a mental hospital.

Here's a quote that I spotted in a recent user review: "Our Spanish partners in the reading club found it amusing, but were not much impressed. I think we're all too old and have seen too much to be shocked by another adolescent crisis of a very privileged kid. (His parents are well off and buy him anything he wants, and his much more stable siblings love him, so what's his problem?)" Which just suggests to me that these readers are criminally missing the point. (This point of view also seems to omit the death of his brother Allie.) Sadness, depression, mental illness are not the exclusive property of less affluent people with family problems. Depression affects many people in diverse situations, and saying, "Buck up, guy," is not a helpful solution.

As to whether it should be taught in high school, I think that older adolescents can handle and understand all of the above--if it's taught properly. As deniro says, keeping in mind where Caulfield winds up in the end. And keeping in mind the nature of mental illness and trying to come to an understanding of that, rather than a knee-jerk condemnation.

4 -

With me it begins with the fact that I don't consider this book a classic thus yes, I do feel lit is outdated. Victor Hugo's works are classic and are still very much applicable today just as Don Quixote is or Shakespeare. But personally, I can't consider Catcher to be a classic.

And it has nothing to do with whether I enjoyed it or not (I did not). I hated Scarlet Letter but I appreciate it being taught because it serves as an excellent tool for teaching symbolism, motif, allegory, analogy, etc. I just never got into Catcher.

And this comes from someone who has lost an uncle to depression. I have personally witnessed what depression does to a man. But my uncle was intelligent, kind, well-mannered and a true pleasure to be around so it was unfortunate to lose him to depression.

Caufield? Well... I'll still consider the book outdated.

Well, after 50 years, I think it's probably safe to say that Catcher has joined the canon. But I still don't understand why you think it's outdated--you haven't given a single example. (I might also add, for all the ballyhoo out there about Catcher being outdated, it was certainly a class fave when we read it ~9 years ago, in our rural TX high school.)

My sympathy re: your uncle.

It's been more than 20 years since I read the Catcher, and it's my least favourite Salinger book (because of stylistic reasons). That said... the criticism of the book I've glimpsed on LT strikes me by its overwhelming shallowness and banality (to be sure, it's a hallmark of most criticism of classics of high literature around here--just take a look at the ridiculous stuff in the Awful Lit. group). Insofar as these critics are young, I suppose there's hope for them and their education.

The Catcher (which I, remember, do not particularly like, as a book) offers one of the truest, almost melodramatically moving portraits of growing up in literature anywhere. The slang is dated, but so what--it simply places the story in a certain chronological bracket. The story is forever. Holden is iconic: anyone endowed with a smidgen of sensitivity who lived past sixteen lived through the breaking up of consciousness (and often conscience) that takes place, for most of us, in the teens (although loss of innocence, purity, honesty, integrity, terribly enough, can re-occur in endless guises throughout life). This is the awakening from the self into the world--into our horrifying, disgusting, tragic, phoney (one of Holden's trademark terms, and the key to his crisis), debased and debasing world. Very briefly, Holden/Everyman has to decide, find out, whether he accepts to live in this world--where, as Quran puts it, every person is forever suffering loss--or not. His rebellion, his flights, his depression are all a fight against, and its symptoms. Holden is at war, and he will lose, whether he becomes a suicide, or a living loser, like all us non-suicides.

Well, I said "very briefly", and don't want to belie it further, but I could go on. As to liking or disliking characters, that always seems to me utterly beyond the point. A character is true or not, lives or not, and frankly, Holden is infinitely more alive than plenty of reality-based human incarnations I know.

6 -

How interesting. I also read the book ~9 years ago in an urban Texas high school (Westlake hills in Austin) but my class had the adverse reaction. No one enjoyed the book. And we did have quite the excellent teacher.

I don't know. Different strokes for different folks as they say? I would say I'd reread it to see what I think of it now (I must admit I can't remember much of the book except that I disliked it) but I'm not a re-reader and if I were to start doing that, I don't think I'd start with Catcher.

I read Catcher in the Rye for the first time a few years ago as a semi-mature adult, a self-evaluation based on my no longer laughing at The Three Stooges. CR didn't bring back memories of teenage angst for me, I couldn't relate to HC in any way. What brought it home was reading an LT review recently, Dan's review, 5th one down. The obsession with the red cap points to his problem dealing with his brother's death. This view pulls everything together for me.

I can't imagine seeing this side as a teenager unless it happened to me personally. Death is just not real at that age. I was looking forward to re-reading CR this month, but I see it's almost half over. So many books, so little time.

I can't imagine seeing this side as a teenager unless it happened to me personally. Death is just not real at that age.
Perhaps I've always been a morbid little thing, but reading it in my junior year of high school, I was struck by the thought of how I'd feel if my brother died. I burst into tears. Came damn close to running into his room and giving him a hug. I think that plenty of teenagers are capable of becoming emotionally invested enough in the novel that these things will be comprehensible to them.

Medellia, glad to hear another take on it. Thanks for sharing.

The problem with teens reading the novel is that they are too young to have faced the essential conflict in the book: between how things are and how things ought to be (or how we would like them to be). Oh, they may have faced it in a lesser way, not in a way with any serious consequences.

It is a book about compromise. Until they are on their own, with their own survival on the line as a result of their decisions, teens don't know much about compromise—or life. To some degree having them read any literature is a waste of time.

The book might similarly be inacessible to someone who has not undergone this struggle. (But it forces you to go through it. That's the clever part). For example, some of those who say, "It's just about growing up" may have already compromised to such a degree that they can no longer tell the difference between growing up and living by moral standards. What's the big deal, they ask? Trash your principles and get back to work.

In a push and crush world, we are often asked to go with the flow. At those moments we must decide if what is is truly fixed or whether it can be compromised. This decision forces us to learn, as best as we can and preferably ahead of any decisive moment, what is permanent and fixed in life. What to keep with you, what to leave behind.

(Sorry for the long msg - it is a book that requires it) I agree with LolaWalser in most of what she says. Catcher is certainly not Salinger's best book but it is rightly considered a classic, in my opinion. It has to be taught properly though - and by properly I mean understanding what Salinger had in mind. I believe the best article that has been written on Salinger's writings is this one here.. I think it is so spot on with its approach and interpretation of Salinger's books that when I was writing my review of Catcher I could not help but quote chunks of it. The article contains spoilers for those who haven't read Salinger's other works so you might want to wait until you're done with those before you read it if you hate spoilers; but here are some key points Menand makes regarding Catcher:

1) That it might end up on the syllabus for ninth-grade English was probably close to the last thing Salinger had in mind when he wrote the book. He wasn’t trying to expose the spiritual poverty of a conformist culture; he was writing a story about a boy whose little brother has died. Holden, after all, isn’t unhappy because he sees that people are phonies; he sees that people are phonies because he is unhappy. What makes his view of other people so cutting and his disappointment so unappeasable is the same thing that makes Hamlet’s feelings so cutting and unappeasable: his grief.

2) Supposedly, kids respond to “The Catcher in the Rye” because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book. Fourteen-year-olds, even sensitive, intelligent, middle-class fourteen-year-olds, generally do not think that success is a sham, and if they sometimes feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it, it’s not because they think most other people are phonies. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that you don’t know why you feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it. The appeal of “The Catcher in the Rye,” what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with a reason. It gives a content to chemistry. Holden talks like a teen-ager, and this makes it natural to assume that he thinks like a teen-ager as well. But like all the wise boys and girls in Salinger’s fiction—like Esmé and Teddy and the many brilliant Glasses—Holden thinks like an adult. No teen-ager (and very few grownups, for that matter) sees through other human beings as quickly, as clearly, or as unforgivingly as he does. Holden is a demon of verbal incision. He sums people up like a novelist: "She was blocking up the whole goddam traffic in the aisle. You could tell she liked to block up a lot of traffic. This waiter was waiting for her to move out of the way, but she didn’t even notice him. It was funny. You could tell the waiter didn’t like her much, you could tell even the Navy guy didn’t like her much, even though he was dating her. And I didn’t like her much. Nobody did. You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way." The secret to Holden’s authority as a narrator is that he never lets anything stand by itself. He always tells you what to think. He has everyone pegged. That’s why he’s so funny. But The New Yorker’s editors were right: Holden isn’t an ordinary teen-ager—he’s a prodigy. He seems (and this is why his character can be so addictive) to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life.

3)Most of “The Catcher in the Rye” was written after the war, and although it seems odd to call Salinger a war writer, both his biographers, Ian Hamilton and Paul Alexander, think that the war was what made Salinger Salinger, the experience that darkened his satire and put the sadness into his humor.Salinger spent most of the war with the 4th Infantry Division, where he was in a counter-intelligence unit. He landed at Utah Beach in the fifth hour of the D Day invasion, and ended up in the middle of some of the bloodiest fighting of the liberation (...blablabla) ...by the summer of 1945, after the German surrender, he seems to have had a nervous breakdown. He checked himself into an Army hospital in Nuremberg. Shortly after he was released, and while he was still in Europe, he wrote the first story narrated by Holden Caulfield himself, the real beginning of “The Catcher in the Rye.” It was called “I’m Crazy.”

Of course whoever's read Salinger's other books knows that almost all of them (might be ALL) feature a character who' traumatized by the war. Sometimes those "someones" commit suicide. Sometimes they are clinically depressed. And sometimes they go crazy. (don't return from the war with their F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S intact) You know what happens to Holden Caulfield? He dies. He fights in the war and is reported "missing in action". Read the short stories "Last Day of the Last Furlough" and "this Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" (here and here), which feature Holden's siblings, Vincent and Phoebe, to see for yourself. Salinger, according to Wikipedia, "was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, where he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. He was also among the first soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp. Salinger's experiences in the war affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated, and he later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.""

So that said I don't think Catcher should be taught in highschool. It should be taught in college. Why? Because 16year-olds (perhaps because their teachers don't have the patience to really study the book and explain this) will think it is a book about teenage angst, when it is a book about grief and, like all Salinger's books, about the war. Because they will think they identify with Holden when they cannot possibly do so.

My daughter's in high school, will be a junior, and I wouldn't be adverse to her reading CitR for school work. I'd like to discuss it with her and see how they're teaching it. Quite possibly they'd be teaching it wrong, but I could give her my thoughts too and perhaps help her see the depth of the work. I remember loving it, being electrified by it, but not because it was about teenage angst, but because I loved Salinger's style and had to read more by this man.

I totally agree with your comments, girlunderglass. And the Glass stories are about the war and death and suicide and prejudice too. It's the same war my father fought in, and he, too, came home traumatized. By the late 1950s in Los Angeles he had a wife and three children, and men of that generation did not discuss their feelings or emotions or What Happened in the War. Right or wrong, they sucked it up and carried on.

All my dad would share were 2 amusing anecdotes relating to food. I learned from my mother that he, like Salinger, liberated a concentration camp. And once, towards the end of his life, my father, when asked if he killed anybody during the war, said "Oh yes, I did." And didn't explain any further.

Catcher in the Rye is not my favorite work by Salinger, but I think I'll re-read it too. I read it in high school, on my own, not in class, and it was the start of my love affair with the writings of Jerome David Salinger.

I read every short story he ever wrote. In the 70s that meant going to the library and having them pull the old magazines out for you.

I have always hoped that there are lots and lots of good stories and perhaps novels in his house in Cornish NH that will be published during my lifetime.

It is not my favourite either - I much prefer the Glass family books/stories but that doesn't mean I don't think it's really good. It was my first Salinger book (isn't it everyone's first Salinger book?) and like you said "the start of my love affair with the writings of Jerome David Salinger". I think by now I've read everything the man's ever written and it sort of puts Catcher into perspective - the same perspective I discussed in msg 13.

The story about your father is very fitting here. Salinger expressed his feelings through writing - what if he never had that option? He would probably have never talked about it either. Lucky for us, he did express the horror of war in his stories and that is what makes them so touching always. Whether it's Esme or Seymour or Vincent Caulfield, the War is so much a part of the characters and their stories that it is impossible to talk about Salinger's books without referring to it.

"I have always hoped that there are lots and lots of good stories and perhaps novels in his house in Cornish NH that will be published during my lifetime."
Apparently, Karen, he is still writing constantly - he just doesn't want to publish anything. I'm crossing my fingers for more Glass saga stories. :)

I seem to recall that he stopped publishing because he got stuck in a contract that he hated.

He turned 90 this year.

I agree with the comments regarding the connection to the war, though I thought the first story that mentioned Holden was not "I'm Crazy" but "Slight Rebellion Off Madison."

It is fairly easy to see Catcher as a war story. When I wrote my thesis, many years ago, that was the direction I was headed, but I didn't have much confirmation until Ian Hamilton's book, In Search of J.D. Salinger, came out. Hamilton was the first to go in depth about Salinger's war experience. To the degree that Catcher is autobiographical, it provides some revealing connections to war -- as mentioned, for example, both Holden and Salinger wind up in mental hospitals.

Salinger himself was not a disgruntled, prep-school dropout. In fact, he wrote the song for his school and he sent both his kids to prep school, and later the Ivy League. He enlisted in the military before the war and attend creative writing classes at night at Columbia with Whit Burnett, mentioned briefly in Salinger's introduction to the Fiction Writer's Handbook.

He was involved in some of the worst fighting (remember the opening to Saving Private Ryan, I think that was Utah Beach). After the war, he became an intelligence officer for the de-Nazification of Germany. Then he checked himself into a mental hospital in Austria where he fell in love with his nurse and married her. Throughout the years he would attend reunions with his military buddies.

One of the parts of Peggy Salinger's autobiography, Dream Catcher, that sticks with me is when she mentions how much her Dad liked to warm his feet by the fire. During so many of those years in the war he had wet shoes and socks. He had come to appreciate this small comfort very much.

Salinger in the news

http://www.slate.com/id/2219768/pagenum/all

Thanks for that link. Quote form the article:

"nd why would someone as publicity-intolerant as Salinger go to the trouble (ultimately, if the case goes far enough, he might even have to testify in public) of suing the author of the Holden sequel? Perhaps because he still cares about the character and the way it's been read and he doesn't want any more naive misreadings—by pro- or anti-Salingerites—to distort the nature of his work.

Indeed, these misreadings may be the problem that caused Salinger to retreat from the world in the first place. The cult that reads The Catcher in the Rye as an endorsement of Holden Caulfield's callow, purist point of view and obsessively badgered Salinger as a kind of guru could have driven him into hiding. In fact, I once wrote a piece in which I essentially blamed the assassination of John Lennon on the misreading of Catcher by assassin Mark David Chapman, who carried around a copy of the book and proclaimed that he had killed Lennon because he'd become a "phony," just like the ones Holden hated. Of course, anyone who brings to Catcher a somewhat more sophisticated sensibility than Mark David Chapman, an awareness that novelists often use unreliable narrators and, you know, ironic distancing, can see that it's a novel about the conflict between Holden's naive and narcissistic juvenile romanticism (the world is full of "phonies"—duh!) and the kind of accommodations he needs to make to its corruption to survive.

Precisely the point I was trying to make before in msg. 13 - i.e. that Catcher's message has been more often misread, misinterpreted and distorted than perhaps any other book's.

too funny:



He's a professor with a mission: "I, Leonard Wellington Worthy the third, spent twenty-five years designing an assault on a fortress, an expropriation of certain documents, and a perfect escape." Find out what happens when the fortress is J.D. Salinger's bunker, the documents are his unpublished manuscripts, and a messy murder thwarts a perfect plan. (...) Relax: no authors were harmed in this book.

I read and re-read The Catcher in the Rye at university, but never really liked it

The comments on this thread are very invigorating, and tempt me to re-read it. Especially, since I have been reading some other work by Salinger, which makes it feasible to read and re-read all of his work in a relatively short time.