The Catcher In The Rye
“I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.”
The Catcher In The Rye is a beautiful book on teenage rebellion and angst that perfectly captured the emotions of teenage alienation. It is told in the perspective of Holden Caulfield who decides to flee his restrictive boarding school in order to seek solace in New York City. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the “phonies” and find a life of true meaning.
I absolutely loved this novel. Maybe due to its intense semblance to adolescence I may find this book insufferable in a decade or two, however Salinger has such a talent for making beautiful angst-ridden content that it would be hard to not be able to appreciate it at all. The Catcher In The Rye is poetic, depressing, sarcastic, and hopeful all at once. A lot of other reviewers state that your liking for the book will depend on whether you personally identify with Holden Caulfield and his ideologies, however I feel that there is a lot more rhetorically to the novel than just Holden’s angsty speeches on why everyone in the whole goddamn world is a phony.
Salinger truly helped to pioneer a genre where fiction was deliberately less remarkable than reality. His protagonist says little, does little, and thinks little, and yet Salinger doesn't string Holden up as a satire of deluded self-obsessives, he is rather the epic archetype of the boring, yet self-important depressive. The personality of Holden reminded me greatly of the expatriate gang from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as both find trouble accessing and treating their emotions, with the gang drinking their problems away, to Holden running away from his school. Both novels are, in a sense, artificially bland. The stories seem desaturated and dull; little importance is given to big events, thoughts, or conversations. The whole story feels like a drunken party with all the emotions lying under the surface. However, I felt like The Catcher In The Rye delivered on emotions much better than The Sun Also Rises did. Overall, Salinger’s magnum opus still proves to be as impactful today as when it was originally written in the 1950s.
