The Catcher in the Rye

In high school, I avoided reading most of the literature we were assigned.  I found a lot of it dull (somehow, I found MacBeth to be rather interesting) and the discussions we had in class about the books even duller.  Without spending a single cent on CliffsNotes (easily half of the high school used the study guides as replacements for doing the actual reading assignmetns), I managed As in my English classes and passed the AP exam, which helped me avoid having to take English classes in college.  Oddly, when I deiced studying Russian in addition to computer science was a good idea in college, I took a Russian literature (the books were English translations, though) class.  I remember that the non-AP English class had to read the Grapes of Wrath my senior year.  That sounded horrible, and I was glad I didn’t have to do that.

I am not sure if the Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (ISBN: 978-0-316-76917-4) was assigned reading for the regular English class, but it certainly wasn’t for the AP English class, so I never had to read it in high school.  The main character in the book, Holden Caulfield, though, is in high school (well, technically, he’s just been expelled from yet another fancy boarding school), and is struggling with much of what teenagers often contend with, such as a fear of growing up, struggles with making or keeping friends, troubles with figuring out one’s identity, and depression.  The main character is the narrator of the story, which is really just a his train-of-consciousness re-telling of about three days of his life, starting with his having been kicked out of school right before Christmas break, and how he deals with that.  He introduces the reader to some of his teachers, his roommates and dormmates, his sister, a friend from back home, and a few other people he runs into as he tries to avoid going home before he’s supposed to show up at home for Christmas break.  He expresses a lot of negativity for the world and for the people he has contact with, usually because they come across to him as fake.  His rare moments of joy come from his little sister and from other little kids he runs into since they are still innocent and present to the world just who they are, not trying to hide anything or be something they’re not.  He tells his sister that his dream job would be to be a “catcher in the rye,” saving kids running in a rye field toward a cliff from falling off the edge, which is a metaphor for helping people preserve their innocence and lack of “phoniness” (one of his favorite words).

The book was an interesting one, although I would say I had to really push through the first third or so before I felt like had any sense at all of what this kid was about.  His rich, privileged background, combined with his emo outlook and New York street-tough bravado was foreign, complex, and rather off-putting.  Another reason I felt like the book was a slog at times was the insane amount of profane language, easily a dozen profanities per page.  There was also a healthy dose of vulgarity thrown in.  Were this a book a movie script in the 1980s or early 1990s, it would’ve got an R rating.  These days, it probably pulls off a PG-13.  There was also a lot of substance abuse and a handful of sexual references as well as other suggestive scenes.  All of this made me wonder why this book is so commonly assigned in high schools.  The protagonist is a high schooler, but Salinger himself noted that he wrote the novel for an adult audience, and the content is definitely only, as they say, “for mature audiences only.”  I thought the themes explored in the book were interesting, and were things, especially the one about phoniness, even I, now far removed from my teenage years, could relate to in one way or another, and I understand the kind of character the author wanted to portray, but I thought the final product was over the top and detracted from the message of the story.  Remembering my impressionable teenage years, it would’ve been very distracting, and I’m glad I wasn’t exposed to it then.

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