Tysune’s Blog Death of Destiny

“Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger

Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
ISBN-10: 0316769487
ISBN-13: 978-0316769488

Catcher in the Rye is a fictional novel written by J.D. Salinger. It is available for purchase from http://www.amazon.ca/dp/0316769487.

Catcher in the Rye contains a story narrated by Holden Caulfield. Holden is a 16 year old boy attending a university prep school in the US called Pencey Prep. After failing a bunch of classes and getting in conflicts with other students at the school, Holden gets expelled from Pencey Prep and heads back to his home city of New York. Putting off his return home (and having to explain his situation to his parents), Holden visits many places as well as past and new acquaintances. Through these, an adventure is weaved for Holden--the Catcher in the Rye.

Although a disputable subject matter, I would say that Holden is mentally unstable; however, after talking with people last night, I'm not sure how to classify Holden's "disorder". It's been suggested that Holden is depressed, although I'm not sure that I agree with that suggestion. I would consider Holden to be more along the lines of insane, especially with some of the random thought processes he has and the constant dropping of the term "madman" in the novel. This carries on throughout the novel, although I think the first "wtf" moment is when Holden describes his favorite short story of his brother. I remember it as some "hilarious" story about a boy who buys a goldfish and then doesn't show it to anybody. Hilarious.

Another word found repeatedly in the novel is "phony", which is used by Holden to describe virtually every non-child character in the novel. According to Princeton's WordNet Search, a phony can be more simply described as a hypocrite or a pretender. Ironically, Holden himself is a hypocrite in calling other people phonies. On several occasions during his story, he describes himself as a total pretender. One memorable instance of this is where he gets punched by a pimp, and then describes his "wound" as a gunshot, with his guts spilling out from his stomach. Nonetheless, his lack of awareness of his own phoniness is a good indicator of his bias as a narrator.

Another bizarre thing observed with Holden is his relationship with children (and lack of relationships with adults). As noted before, Holden doesn't refer to children (at least, not often) as phonies, no matter how much they pretend to be somebody else. Additionally, his two favorite characters appear to be his younger siblings. His view of children emphasizes his displayed lack of maturity and avoiding the process of truly growing-up throughout the story. The only "growing-up" Holden really does is drinking and making sexual references--both of which may be simple tools Holden uses to convince himself that he is no longer a child.

Overall, I found Catcher in the Rye to be an interesting read. The worst part about the book for me was that I got pretty annoyed with Holden at times. Nonetheless, I recommend the book to people interested in reading the classics without dealing with writing that is too difficult to interpret.

Anybody interested in discussing this book, feel free to discuss it here: http://forums.deathofdestiny.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=17.

Also, note to anybody that's interested: our book club is reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury for the month of November. It will be discussed at http://forums.deathofdestiny.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=21.