Salinger’s Holden Caulfield speaks to a generation in Catcher

The Catcher in the Rye is an incredible book, the epitome of why I wanted to embark on this quest to read all these classics that I hadn’t been through before. I’ve read others gush about this book, seen movies where people discuss it, but never read it myself. It lived up to the hype, and I can see why it influenced an entire generation of people who came of age in the 50’s and 60’s.

The book tells of just a couple days in the life of Holden Caulfield, and written from his perspective. Holden is a young man, but he has yet to find anything to which he wants to apply himself, and so by age 16, he’s already being kicked out of his third or fourth high school. Coming from an affluent family in New York, he knows he’s disappointing his parents, but he doesn’t seem to care too much. He spends his final day at school interacting with his roommates in his dorm and a former teacher, before grabbing a train for New York. There he continues floating through life. He gets a room at a hotel, has a hooker sent up to his room but can’t do anything with her (he laments that he’s a virgin, mostly through lack of effort than any other reason), spends a late night dancing with girls from out of town, has a date with an old fling, visits a few bars and Central Park, and even sneaks into his family home (a posh apartment in a high rise) to see his cherished younger sister. Holden decides that rather than face his parents, he’s going to hitchhike out west and get a job, although the reader gets the distinct impression that the reason behind this is more for lack of direction in his life than for any purpose to make himself self-sufficient.

There are a lot of other events in Holden’s spectacular couple days drifting through New York, but all of these events by themselves are not the true “story” of the book. The real meat and potatoes is the running dialogue in Holden’s head as he tells the tale of those days to us. At his core, Holden is going through the same things that many 16-year-olds go through. He’s lonely, feeling disconnected with his peers, and purposefully alienates himself from others, calling them phony or crumby. By doing so, he sets himself apart from others, though it isn’t clear if he truly thinks he is better than them, or just using this as a self defense mechanism. He’s definitely immature, but there’s no fault in that at age 16. He also have a very frank, yet very endearing way of talking to us, and I as the reader quickly felt like Holden’s only confident (outside of his sister Phoebe) in the whole world. It is easy to see why the book spoke to its readers, and I think if I had read it at a younger age, it may have had a lasting impression on me. As it is, it is a tremendous read and a fun one. I kept hoping Holden would come out well in the end; you just can’t help but root for him. Fittingly so though, the book’s ending is as uncertain as Holden’s life and future.