Get a Life, Holden Caulfield
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The "Catcher In The Rye" is a snippet Holden Caulfield mishears from a poem about two children growing up and having sex. He thinks it's about catching children who are falling out of the field, protecting people from growing up, when in fact it's the opposite. His sister points this out to him when he takes her from their home.
The point of Catcher is that Holden is wrong. He thinks he's being bold and brave and telling the truth and rebelling, when in fact he's too young to know anything. The moral is supposed to be that we all make mistakes and think we're the heroes, but that eventually we all grow up.
But that's not taught anymore, so instead we have a bunch of whiny kids idolizing that book and a bunch of people who ought to appreciate it all thinking it's whiny. Salinger's better than he's given credit for. Again I blame schools.
Read the first page: "Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam [sic] autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy."
Holden is in a mental hospital. This is confirmed on the last page [approx.] of the book.
"I could probably tell you what I did after I went home, and how I got sick and all, and what school I'm supposed to go to next fall, after I get out of here."
From that, Holden is in the hospital. The last line of the book says, "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
From what I remember, this means that Holden made up all of those stories. His family realized he was crazy because they know none of those things actually happened, put him in the hospital, and now he doesn't get to see his family or friends very often.
Of course, the fun thing about fiction that also doesn't get said enough is that the debating over what happened is part of the fun. I had one teacher who would present these analyses like they were hard fact, when in reality the only fact is what the author gives you, and the analyses can be debated with that in mind.
The interpretation presented to me in school was that Holden was simply unwell and that anyone experiencing the kind of angst and alienation described in the book is sick and will end up in a mental hospital. As if it were a cautonary tale against having negative thoughts and feelings.
I didn't buy it at the time, but it was only years later that I realized just how much was lost in reading it that way.
Compare that to the titular scene from Catcher In The Rye:
"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like — "
"It's 'If a body meet* a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."*
"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."
She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though.
"I thought it was 'If a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And 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. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
It suffers from being out of context, but basically Holden - the first talker - is talking with Phoebe about his life, and it's really immaculately done. Listen to his words. He doesn't come across as a phony-hating phony. He's just a confused guy trying to talk to his sister. The dialogue is a little dated in its construction, but it's still concise and powerful and it does pretty much exactly what it's trying to do. He mentions he wants to catch these children, but at the same time the narrator's admitting that he was wrong about this when he said it. And he doesn't come across as a douche, he comes across as a scared college student. The "douche" interpretation comes from people who skimmed the book and resented it from the beginning. I had that attitude for a while. It's not fair to the book.
In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey is an over-the-top pervert whose death was completely welcomed. In Donnie Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal is filthily melodramatic. Holden Caulfield, though, is really easy to sympathize with. He's not at all a broken, cliched character. It's hard even to call him cliched when you look directly at the soliloquy lines. Here are two samples from around the same part in the book:
The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they'll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don't like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they'll say he's conceited. Even smart girls do it.
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The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.
This isn't just Salinger writing "Oh man I hate how fake people are". It's him providing this view of the world again from this frustrated kid. And he's pessimistic about it and you can read the book as saying he's wrongly pessimistic - I do - but his pessimism isn't at all melodramatic and you can read Catcher In The Rye without it catching you up at all. I read it for the story: The leave from college, the search for his family, the incident with the hooker, are all really moving and engaging bits of story, and Holden's frustration is accurate enough that you can sympathize it even when you disagree with him.
If you look at "Catcher" as a critique of Holden Caulfield, you're still doing the book a disservice. Catcher In The Rye is first and foremost a story, and if you try reading it without analyzing it you'll probably find that it holds up terrific even when it's not a part of literature. That's the part of these books that all this analysis ignores: The point is always to tell a story, and the rest of this is just the icing on top.
I was lucky because I got a teacher who took a lot of pains to separate the book from its context, and who got us all reading books without wondering at first why we were supposed to be reading this. Teachers like that are sadly rare, though.
To Holden, being this pure, innocent child figure is the ultimate manner of living, and that's why he loves Phoebe so much - he sees her as this embodiment of what he wishes he was. The irony there is that Phoebe is the girl who reveals to Holden that he's got this whole catcher in the rye thing wrong, and that while he's trying to stop from growing up, this poem that resonates so much with him is about growing up. It just happens to use sex as its metaphor for growing old, which is a metaphor Catcher borrows for its plot.
1) "Holden's so cool-- I'm just like him" 2) "Holden's a loser-- I'm nothing like him" 3) "Holden's a loser-- I was just like him"
From the article, it appears that the teenagers reading the book these days are jumping straight to the second stage. I hope they re-read it when they are a decade or two older.
This has become the acceptable image of youthful discontent, the one that educational institutions prescribe for their students.
What does it say about the author of this piece, and her generation, that she seems to think teens (and the rest of us) should want to be miserable? Hell, I can't prove that we shouldn't, but that's no reason to assume it.
What a completely random sentence.
Personally, having looked up a lot of the symbolism in the novel on my own, I truly enjoy <em>Catcher</em> and all the life lessons it teaches. I, at times, related to Holden, even through all his inconsistencies and flaws. It's an excellent book and I hope teachers understand how to teach it better at their "work"shops.
The film (and moreso, the book) Wonderboys I think depicts young academia brilliantly, much better than Catcher. It has the crazy mentor (which I also had) which Catcher lacks.
I do think the millennials are more integrated into society than the Gen Xers or earlier Gen Ys who were more interested in rebelling. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the millennials come of age.
I feel old now...
Which is not to say that I find all classic literature terrible. Just some of it.