Salinger said his mother was over protective. He often talks about her with very high regards. Holden is not a character who tried to sugarcoat the way he sees the fakeness around him. I think that is another one of the reasons I like his character so much.
For example, he is quite upset with the fact that his brother D. Holden even says that his brother is his favorite author. Salinger himself is a man who wrote for his own pleasure and likeness. Though he found her extremely irritating he thought she was very attractive as well. Despite Holden being a sixteen year old teenage boy he acts much older than his age.
One time in the story he has the chance to be with a prostitute but instead of acting like a pig, he starts to feel sorry for her and instead tried to have a conversation with her. He even offers to pay her for good conversation instead of for sex. But the reason I find his character mature and intellectual is for other reasons.
Holden does not hold money or material things to be really important. He is more excited to hang out with his kid sister than he is any other time in the entire book.
He is content with something that would probably be boring to other guys his age. Like many teenagers, Holden is often depressed. The way he deals with it most times actually breaks my heart in a way. He likes to talk to his deceased kid brother, Allie. He will take a real event that he can remember where he was talking with him and pretend he is talking to him again.
I do that sometimes when I get very depressed. He is not a jock. He is not a math whiz or a science whiz. He is not really interested in sports. He is on his own a lot and loves it at first, but happiness and love are meant to be shared with others. It has a much less meaning when by itself and he realizes it by the end of the novel.
He is growing intellectually little by little throughout the whole book. He realizes what really makes him happy. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone and everyone who would like to read a story that could possibly change the way they view the world. I have honestly laughed outloud to myself as I read this story. Yes, there is talk about drinking, sex, and lots of cussing, but if you are going to avoid reading this story because of that then your missing out on a beautiful masterpiece.
View all 20 comments. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye is a story by J. Salinger, first published in serial form in and as a novel in Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leave Book from Books - The Catcher in the Rye, J.
View all 3 comments. Sep 27, Paul Bryant rated it did not like it Shelves: novels. A spell in the army would do that young man a power of good! Or maybe a couple of bags of heroin. Anything to stop that whining voice View all 70 comments. Nov 17, Henry Avila rated it really liked it. Holden Caulfield is a mixed- up cynical teenager, getting kicked out of another prestigious school, Pencey Prep, in Pennsylvania, the irony is that this obviously intelligent, privileged, 16 year- old, is somehow flunking out, why?
He doesn't care about anything, especially education, bored and feeling neglected by his wealthy, New York City family. At least Caulfield passed English class, he's always reading, his big problem, he's so unmotivated, nothing seems important to this kid set in Holden Caulfield is a mixed- up cynical teenager, getting kicked out of another prestigious school, Pencey Prep, in Pennsylvania, the irony is that this obviously intelligent, privileged, 16 year- old, is somehow flunking out, why?
At least Caulfield passed English class, he's always reading, his big problem, he's so unmotivated, nothing seems important to this kid set in Holden has no real friends in school, or liking anyone there, and the sentiment is very mutual, everything is "phony", his favorite word, which he speaks and thinks constantly.
When Holden's younger brother Allie, died three years ago, it marked him forever, afterwards, the boy was changed and stops believing. Getting into a fight with a much stronger opponent, his roommate Stradlater, and losing naturally no surprise to Holden, punishment he craved just before sneaking out of Pencey, an institution he hates, with a fervent passion.
Taking the train to New York City, his hometown, but Holden doesn't go back to his uncaring family, his father, a well- to- do lawyer, too busy for Holden, nervous mother, she wants quiet, please, older brother D. Checking into the Edmont Hotel in the "Big Apple", a rather shabby, rundown place, I wouldn't recommend staying there and then the elevator operator the sleazy Maurice , gets him a prostitute, Sunny, she's Holden's age and he kind of feels sorry for her.
Gives the lady of the night, five dollars just for talking, sends her away, good deeds are always rewarded, Maurice, comes back with Sunny for more money, a dispute arises, but they leave with an extra five, and a sock in the stomach of the poorer, but wiser Holden.
Chain smoking with gusto and delight, drinking in bars, dives like a man, where people aren't too concerned about a customers age just the color of his dough, going to a Broadway play with a very accommodating girlfriend, attending the loathsome movies and seeing all those phonies, the actors, fighting with unsmiling cab drivers , the kid is having a good time, living like a grown-up, as long as the cash lasts.
But what will he do, runaway or go back and face the music The bible for disgruntled teenagers, and a must read for every new generation View all 37 comments. Jul 19, Dan rated it did not like it Shelves: literary-fiction. Reading this book was one of the biggest wastes of my time in the past twenty years. Holden Caulfield's problem is that he is the biggest phony he knows. Count the number of times he lies or behaves like someone he's not and then try to convince me otherwise.
This is not a book about teenage alienation. It's about a smart-ass who can't deal with who he really is and spends almost pages ranting about it - most likely to a doctor in a psych ward. View all 35 comments. Jun 19, Melanie rated it really liked it Shelves: classics.
As a child, we are protected from life. As you enter adulthood you could start to see things and people as phony or fake. Maybe not people, As a child, we are protected from life. Maybe not people, but certain tasks or events certainly are. There is a conflict, simply of time and energy. We desire the intentional and struggle towards spirituality; all while trying to earn a paycheck, wash our dishes, and sleep each night.
It kind of reminds me of what I picture an AA meeting to look like. I think, rarely could someone find a place where people are more vulnerable, open, and honest with each other.
Even if they win over addiction… how could life ever feel as full after that brief moment shared with others who completely understand? At the same time, the point of those meetings is to help people live- not just free from drugs, but maybe free to live in the mundane? Free to enjoy the dance of life, the needs of the soul balanced with the chores too. Catcher in the rye touches on some of these questions. Holden struggles with growing up.
He sees everything as meaningless and adults as predictable and fake. I think he is mourning the loss of his innocence… maybe not just right from wrong, but the loss of dreams growing up seems to require. Holden, while at the museum that is exactly the same as it was when he was a kid says he likes it, because each time you visit "the only thing that would be different would be you…" and goes on to say "certain things they should stay the way they are.
You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. When I was a kid, I used to smell my dad's coffee- that strong sugary-sweet smell of roasted beans.
You wait for your chance to be let in on this excellent secret. Thinking it is just the caffeine that is preventing your parents from giving you a taste.
Finally, they do and then all your dreams of that sweet flavor come crashing down! It's wrecked! Coffee isn't at all what you thought it was! That is, until the day you give it another chance, you start to be able to smell and taste the different tones coffee has.
You can appreciate it for its varied, and almost living flavors. You see… Coffee isn't bad- it just wasn't what you always thought. The key is in finding the hidden flavors and getting over the fact that it will never taste as sweet as it smells. I think Holden struggled with the initial shock, that although life is more bitter than it "smells", or than you think it will be, there are the hidden joys and sweet flavors that make it almost better!
Holden experiences the extremes of entering into adulthood and relates it in a way everyone, maybe especially, teenagers can understand. He is a flawed character who is desperate and depressed. As the reader, you can see why he feels the way he does, as he explains it so well you almost feel it with him. However, you can also see the flaws in his thinking. The author doesn't romanticize Holden's life, you don't read it thinking he has some special key to life that we all need.
You simply feel his struggle to fit in and hope eventually he can learn to play the game and see the beauty that is there, hidden a little. View all 13 comments. Holden Caulfield is a character many, many people hate. And trust me, I get it.
He's a posturing hypocrite. He's a dick. I wanted to hit him in the face for at least a hundred pages. We know this. But he's a character that, for some strange reason, resonates with thousands of people. Well, simply put, it's because he's written like this on purpose.
But I think that doesn't quite get to the heart of it. Holden is a fifteen-year-old kid on the verge of an emotional breakdown. He's an asshole. He's a liar. He's a hypocrite. And he's also See, as a preteen, I struggled with severe emotional issues. I had depression and anxiety, although I didn't know it yet.
I was going through major emotional issues with my parents, ones far worse than teen angst. I was on the lowest rung of the social pole at school. And God, I was an asshole. I was whiny and I was a hypocrite. I knew it, too, and I cried myself to sleep thinking about it. In the daylight, I told myself everyone else was terrible and that's why my world was falling apart.
I was just as hypocritical and torn up inside as Holden is. Holden is an asshole, granted. But he is an asshole that it's hard not to relate to. So all this is to say that I completely understand why so many hated this book. But it resonates with me, and with so many people I know, for the exact reason that it will be polarizing. This is the kind of book that's going to be incredibly divisive.
This is the kind of book that should maybe be taught by a teacher who loves it thanks, 9th grade English teacher who hated me. And this is the kind of book that sticks in my head, a year after I first read it.
It's truly worth the read. Sep 29, Lyn rated it really liked it. What can I say? As I write this review, there are almost 2 million ratings on Goodreads and over 36, reviews. I wish now that I read this sooner. I did not love this book. I was getting apprehensive, was I going to be one What can I say? What did he read that led him to the act? Or was his declaration a pretense for something else?
Why is Holden so cynical and at the same time respectful and thoughtful of others? With a revulsion of even touching the words written on a wall?
Is Holden gay? Ultimately I am left with more questions than answers. This is a book I want to think about. View all 22 comments. Jun 25, Lisa rated it it was amazing Shelves: books-to-read-before-you-die , favorites.
Holden is the teenage mind in all its confusion, rebellion and irrationality, and in all its undefined hope for individual heroism. It's not even helpful, realistic, smart, beneficial Using Holden is the teenage mind in all its confusion, rebellion and irrationality, and in all its undefined hope for individual heroism.
Using swearwords, trying different ways to tune out reality, not doing what one is supposed to do, those are all different methods of practicing the BIG SCARE.
Growing up. Facing responsibility. Soon, soon, soon And the weight is heavy on the young shoulders. Roaming the streets relaxes nerves. But still.
There is an element of idealism in most teenagers' hearts. They don't usually want to fall into the traps of conventional evil. They want to change the world, make a difference. They are just struggling to come up with ideas how to do that, as their experience is limited. And they can't put their ideas into a wider context either. So being a catcher in the rye may make sense.
It isn't necessarily the teenager's fault if nobody turns up where they wait to save lives, right? Teenage intentions are more often than not good.
The results vary though. And their verbal skills are developing in conjunction with their minds as well: "Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry. Luckily, some of them remember later and share, - for us teachers to enjoy when we think it is impossible to understand the monsters that all of a sudden show up at the end of Grade 7, replacing lovely and enthusiastic children over night!
I hope some of my students use the long summer to enter the beautiful arrangement Holden suggests and read this classic. Hope's that thing with feathers View all 25 comments. Jan 05, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: pants-crapping-awesome. So it's like this. My not-just-GR-friend-but-very-real-friend brian called and told me that J. Salinger had died maybe about a half hour ago as I begin this 'review'. This sounds immensely absurd, pathetically sentimental, and embarrassing to admit, but I'm glad I heard it from him and not from some animatronic talking head with chin implants and immobile hair on the nightly news or from an obnoxiously matter-of-fact internet blurb, commenting like a machine on how Holden Caulfield has Okay.
This sounds immensely absurd, pathetically sentimental, and embarrassing to admit, but I'm glad I heard it from him and not from some animatronic talking head with chin implants and immobile hair on the nightly news or from an obnoxiously matter-of-fact internet blurb, commenting like a machine on how Holden Caulfield has lately become less relevant to Generation Y or Z or AA or whatever stupid generation we're up to now.
At first when brian told me, I thought, 'Oh, well He was old. He was probably batshit crazy anyway. It was his time to check out, I guess. What difference does it make? He's been dead to the world since the mids. Before I was even born. A strong case could be made that he truly died in spirit when he started stalking Elaine Joyce on the set of s sitcom Mr.
And yet I still clung to this still technically living legend as if he were some kind of talisman I could wear around my neck, a good luck charm to ward off phonies and all manner of soulless dreck who populate this despicable world, writing 'fuck' on grammar school walls and metaphorical equivalents.
After returning for a few minutes to my soul-deadening job, which -- when you really get right down to it -- is just another way of killing time until I join Salinger in oblivion, I started getting all funny-feeling about it. At the risk of sounding like an adult contemporary power ballad written by Jim Steinman, with synthesized violins in the background, I began to feel as if my adolescence had finally come to an end.
I guess it's about time. So of course. I love all of Salinger's writing, but his value in my life has far surpassed that of a 'mere' literary pastime. He has kept me company for many years when I felt left behind by the exigencies of time and the claims of 'maturity. With graying hair. And deepening crow's feet. What idiots! Lots and lots of people feel a special connection to Salinger's writing -- for just the reasons I described -- and lots and lots of people hate his writing because they find it grating and immature Catcher in the Rye or pretentious and ponderous the Glass family stories.
But I felt compelled to commemorate today in some way -- however trite and superfluous -- because I sense again and again with the relatively recent deaths of some of my heroes, like Ingmar Bergman and Jacques Derrida, for instance that I am entering a world that is no longer safeguarded by the great men and women of the elder generation; I am entering a world in which I am now the elder Yes, this still frightens me, but I'll always have Salinger's very particular and empathetic world to which to retreat when I have sacrificed too much of myself to a real world I'll never completely understand or feel at home in.
View all 56 comments. Feb 05, Licia rated it did not like it Recommends it for: spoiled, white, rich kids who feel misunderstood. I know there are people who thought this book changed their lives and helped them find their unique way in the world, but coming from a non-white, non-middleclass background, as a kid, I really resented having to read about this spoiled, screwed up, white, rich kid who kept getting chance after chance and just kept blowing it because he was so self-absorbed and self-pitying.
I felt at the time there was no redeeming value in it for me. I was born on the outside trying my best to get in. I felt n I know there are people who thought this book changed their lives and helped them find their unique way in the world, but coming from a non-white, non-middleclass background, as a kid, I really resented having to read about this spoiled, screwed up, white, rich kid who kept getting chance after chance and just kept blowing it because he was so self-absorbed and self-pitying.
I felt no sympathy for him at all. I didn't even find him funny. It just made me angry. I guess it still does. View all 36 comments. Jan 22, andrea rated it did not like it Shelves: a-group-of-characters-pissed-me-off , disappointed , heavy-topics , bad-beginning , bland , books-i-read-for-school , douchebag-character , tried-too-hard-to-do-something , really-disliked , surface-level-characters. Please take this review as an account from a fourteen year old.
Maybe consider that before you make some extremely inappropriate judgments about me. I cannot positively find a good thing to say about it whatsoever.
Before anyone decides to come at me for hating this book and say, "Andrea, you're so immature and uneducated" or "A Please take this review as an account from a fourteen year old. Before anyone decides to come at me for hating this book and say, "Andrea, you're so immature and uneducated" or "Andrea, it was written in the s, what do you expect", no , I will NOT apologize for detesting this book and no , I will NOT excuse any of its problematic content because it came out a long time ago.
To top it all off, I practically killed myself reading it. It was awful to get through. I wish I could throw the book into a paper shredder, but it belongs to my dad and it's from the early s so if I wait a couple of years, I can probably get an antique shop store credit.
This book is about A character examination? An inadequate and inaccurate account of depression? A plot to piss everyone off who is reading? A slacker who does stupid things and uses hypocrisy and lying to get himself out of situations that he created?
A boy who gets kicked out of school? One of the worst things, if not the worst thing about this book, is the vernacular used.
Salinger writes in this method in which he attempts to emulate the way an actual teenager speaks. That would make it more realistic, he thought, but it was actually just annoying. If I have to hear another character [Holden Caulfield] use the phrase "like a madman" or "like a bastard" or "goddam" which was horribly misspelled, by the way , I am literally going to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.
To make it even worse, it was also obnoxiously repetitive. I counted the word "goddam" seven times on one page. He also had an affinity for the sentence "it killed me". Every time that was used, I literally wanted to be killed. The other most pressing attribute of this book is Holden Caulfield himself.
Probably my least favorite character of all time. I got dragged for disliking this book, so I think I deserve to drag this character for some time now. I have been shamed and judged many a time due to my interests and anxieties. The fact that Holden Caulfield is constantly judging, constantly shaming, and constantly criticizing other people for what they do when he should just stand in a mirror and do a self-examination infuriates me.
There is not a second that passes by in that book without Holden getting angry or "depressed" because someone lived their life and upset his little hipster fantasy. Holden seems to be agitated by everything, yet he continues to comply with the things that agitate him. I'll reference a specific example. It strikes the reader, or at least a certain kind of reader, as all the more real. I think this is why The Catcher in the Rye has caught the affection of so many rebellious young people, including some famously unhinged killers.
Many novels have critiqued modern society and its denizens, but few, if any, in the kind of language that makes those readers feel the thoughts are ripped from their own minds. But I think this also explains why not everyone feels this way about The Catcher in the Rye.
If they are not the kinds of thoughts you already have and if Caulfield's voice does not resemble yours to some extent, then the language can leave you unimpressed. Or it impresses you in the way that someone doing accents can impress you without moving you. Of course, the novel's actual critiques of people and upper middle-class urban life are also important to the novel's reception, especially by the cynical.
Salinger is a deeply cynical writer. Interesting idea, but I find Caulfield's caustic take on his arena of action much more juvenile than might be expected of a soldier. Norman Mailer who wrote a real war novel called Salinger the "greatest mind ever to stay in prep school. This is not necessarily a criticism. Salinger creates Caulfield as a prep school rebel.
The perspective in the novel is that of the character, who has never got beyond this teenage world view. Salinger made a masterful work of it. Which, by no means, is to imply anyone should take it—or less to act on it—as a mature statement of the way the world is.
I expect, as time goes by, people may be able to see this more clearly and let the novel take its place as a minor classic of its time that had an outsize effect on literature to come. The Cstcher in the Rye. First edition. This way you were neither fish nor fowl. Fish and fowl, adored and criticized, Salinger was remembered by some military academy classmates as a guy whose conversation "was laced with sarcasm" but by others as "a regular guy" and by teachers as "quiet, thoughtful, always anxious to please.
He edited the yearbook, too, with what so completely passed as earnest conscientiousness that though it is tempting to view his activities as virtuoso performances of deep subterfuge--given his youthful interest in acting, especially--they might also be imagined to have been painfully disconcerting. Holden's description of himself as "the most terrific liar you ever saw" might well have applied to Salinger, and Salinger's own judgment of his divided nature, in this era before "situational selves," might well have involved the word that haunts his book, "phony.
A poignant part of Salinger's genius seems, in any case, to include the way that he transmuted--as he perhaps felt he had to--his particular issues and injuries into a more enigmatic "autobiography" of alienation. And it can only be counted ironic that the result came to exemplify American authenticity: Like James Dean , Holden Caulfield is for many the very picture of the postwar rebel. Young, crude, misunderstood, he stands up to conformist pressures, is drawn to innocence, etcetera.
Never mind that Holden is white, male, straight, sophisticated, rich, and a product of the '40s; he personifies anguished resistance to '50s America--indeed, for many, America's truest self. Whether Salinger intended his creation to assume anything like this role--indeed, if he had any notion of the projection of a national identity as a desirable literary goal as did his contemporary, John Updike, for example --is unclear.
And is there not something, if not phony, then at least a little strange, about Holden's enshrinement in American culture? To some degree, academia took its cue from the culture; Catcher's skyrocketing sales amid the mid-'50s "youthquake" fairly demanded explanation. Critics like George Steiner saw the bookas all too fitting for the paperback market--short, easy to read, and flattering "the very ignorance and moral shallowness of his young readers. Drawing on the work of Donald Pease, critic Leerom Medovoi has described how a new Cold War American canon arose around this time--a canon in which American Renaissance works like Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were cast as a "coherent tradition that dramatized the emergence of American freedom as a literary ideal, somehow already waging its heroic struggle against a prefigured totalitarianism.
No doubt other scholars, being scholars, disagree. Still, Medovoi's ideas may, in conjunction with the book's Mona Lisa-like ambiguity, help explain how Catcher came to occupy what by other measures seems a strangely high place in American letters, for the book strays notably from mainstream literary values.
It is, to begin with, often precious and sentimental. What's more, while the critic Alfred Kazin is, I think, on the mark in ascribing the excitement of Salinger's stories to his "intense, his almost compulsive need to fill in each inch of his canvas, each moment of his scene," the writing in Catcher is nowhere near so alive with moti mentali. The whole, too, is slight. Salinger characterized himself as "a dash man and not a miler"; and indeed, though Catcher 's opening explodes with life, the whole reads like a novella that only just managed to shed its diminutive.
It does not develop appreciatively through its middle; Holden neither deepens nor comes to share the stage with other characters. Instead the book starts to feel narrow and maniacally one-note; reading it today, one wonders whether its real contribution lies in its anticipation of Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism.
In contrast to, say, The Great Gatsby, this is manifestly not a book to be studied for insight into the novel form. Unless, that is, one is interested is how a book can hit home with no evidence of its author ever having read Henry James's The Art of Fiction.
Catcher demonstrates, among other things, how variously and mysteriously novels finally work and how even sophisticated audiences tend to genuflect to art but yield to testimony.
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