Book Review (Rucksack): The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye

Written by J.D. Salinger in 1951

The Raccoon: After getting expelled from yet another private school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield runs away and wanders the streets of New York.  Salinger’s famous novel is about coming to terms rather than coming of age, as Holden struggles to accept that he is growing up.

UNMASKED: The Catcher in the Rye has been a polarizing work since the moment it was published.  Holden is a sarcastic, immature, and frequently unreliable narrator, a stylistic choice by Salinger that I personally couldn’t work through.  Consequently, I hated The Catcher in the Rye.  If you can embrace Holden for his numerous faults, however, then you may find the narrator and his story endearing.

The narrative unfolds over the course of only three days, with nothing objectively important filling that time.  Add to that Holden’s frequent digressions and criticisms, and the novel ends up reading more as a running commentary than a sequence of developing events.  This, I believe, is Salinger’s purpose in telling the story: to show people’s disillusionment in the 1950s with life and society through the mind of a teenager.  The author uses the feelings of nihilism and estrangement that most teens already experience as a lens to examine what many veterans struggled with in the years following World War II.

Where does this leave the reader?  We are swept up into the frivolous struggles of a sick boy; perhaps simply sick of how artificial the people around him act, but by the end of the novel are expected to understand that he is neither mentally nor physically healthy either.  Holden reacts strongly to events that have no meaning to anyone else, a further commentary from the author on how useless the war was.

Salinger concludes The Catcher in the Rye with only a half-hearted resolution to Holden’s story, and I found myself wondering what the point was.  Yet, the novel’s strength lies in its lessons rather than its plot.  The reader is so occupied with Holden that he/she does not even realize until long past putting the book down that Holden’s behavior and emotions are tools, carefully placed and designed to show that change is inevitable and that no issue is black and white.

Strengths:

• Salinger brings the reader into the narrator’s head so effectively that the character of Holden stays with him/her for life.

Weaknesses:

• Only one other character, Holden’s sister Phoebe, is mentioned in more than one scene, and she has no development outside of Holden’s own changing view of her.
• Holden’s tangents take away from the reader’s understanding of events, just as often as they add to it.

Rating: 11/20 ducks

Ideal Setting: Read this when you feel alienated.  Sometimes the boxes that we try so hard to fit into are just in our heads.