On The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

“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 all and they don’t see where they are 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.”


While on the surface The Catcher in The Rye appears to be the story of a young man's expulsion from yet another school, if we dig a little deeper the book is in fact a highly perceptive study of one individual's understanding or attempts at understanding his social conditions. Holden Caulfield, a teenager growing up in 1950s New York, has been expelled from school for his poor performance once again. In an attempt to get away from the school and his roommates, who he know finds difficult to be with he leaves school a few days prior to the end of term, and goes to New York to 'take a vacation' before returning to his parents' inevitable wrath. Told as a first person account by Holden himself, or rather as a conversation between Holden and the reader, the book describes Holden's thoughts and activities over these few days, during which he describes a developing nervous breakdown, symptomised by his bouts of unexplained depression, strong sexual feelings for multiple women for a few fleeting instants of time, impulsive spending and generally odd, erratic behaviour; some shocking and some simply heart warming, prior to his eventual nervous collapse.


The book follows Holden’s stream of consciousness as he moves from topic to topic. Holden’s talks move from mundane beginnings such as a commonplace object to previous life events which give deep insight to how Holden’s thought process has shaped over the years. Through the book Salinger has tried to bring out a teenager’s deep need for finding people around him whom he can understand and trust, a sense of belonging if I may say so. As Holden sees the world around him, most people are superficial or ‘phony’ and do not manage to hold his interest for long. As a result of this strong opinion he holds about people in general, Holden does not make too many strong friendships and can be seen partly as a loner throughout the book. During the course of his traveling about New York, Holden is constantly looking for company with whom he could spend time and in his attempts to do so we meet several people who help us get an insight into the inner mechanisms of Holden’s brain. His monologues, which constitute the majority of the book also act as the narrator from time to time to carry the tale forward. The reader's view of the world in which Holden lives is thus shaped by Holden's description of the world which the reader can immediately make out is unreliable at best.


We find that what Holden craves the most is a sense of stasis, which he believes is the only way a person can be true to one’s self and hence be “not phony”. Like every teenager, Holden does not like to see people around him and himself change. For this reason Holden is strongly attached to the Museum of National History and finds himself frequently drawn to the place. He finds the sense of stagnancy about the museum a way of endorsing its “non phoniness”, something which appeals to him to a great extent.


The story ends with Holden being sent to another school and being put under psychiatric treatment. With hindsight Holden’s description of the tale of events which led up to his current situation show that true to the teenage spirit which Holden has come to represent, Holden has not changed much. He still remains stubbornly transfixed with his own opinions about the world, his interpretations of people’s actions and the role he wishes to play in his life – The catcher in the rye, a silent guardian of the innocence of children, a person to protect them from the corrupting influence of society and adult life.


The brilliance of the book, which I believe is also the reason for it to be one of the most highly rated novels of the century, lies in the fact that Salinger has written the character of Holden in such detail, that while the reader is fully aware of the fact that Holden is an unreliable narrator and that his opinions cannot be taken at face value, one still finds himself wondering from time to time while reading the book whether it is Holden who is being judgmental about the world by declaring them all as fake and selfish or is it in fact people of the society who fail to see the hopelessness of their own existence and thus are being fake to add a semblance of meaning to their lives. The language used  by Holden is something which Salinger keeps up throughout the book and is so familiar to the reader that it is hard not to relate to some or the other incident being described in the book. The beauty of the book lies in the fact that often while consciously trying not to relate to a character like Holden, the reader cannot but help discover a hidden Holden Caulfield within themselves which makes reading the book a highly personal experience. There are several instances where Holden's behaviour, especially towards his sister Phoebe, touches the reader in a deep and profound way. Progressively through the novel the reader is challenged to think about society's attitude to the human condition - does society have an 'ostrich in the sand' mentality, a deliberate ignorance of the fruitlessness that existence can be? The book engages the reader to challenge his own beliefs and to take a stand with or against Holden Caulfield depending on which the reader ends up either loving or hating the book but in either case, is in for a very uncomfortable read and a lot of soul searching.

- Arnab Dutta
2009EE10379


References:
http://deadcaulfields.com/Catcher.html
www.sciforums.com/archive/index.php/t-22589.html