The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye is a novel written by J.D Salinger. Salinger’s novel is set during a long weekend in the late 1940s - early 1950s in which our cynical little protagonist, Holden Caulfield, guides us through his story. Holden talks in the past tense and begins the story during his final days at his former school, Pencey Prep in Pennsylvania. Due to Academic failure, Holden is expelled and decides to leave a few days before the end of the semester which is when he was originally supposed to leave. He then tells the reader of his adventures which begin on a train departing Pennsylvania and end a few days later in Central Park, New York.
Holden has an all too disturbingly cynical view on the world for someone of such a young age - sixteen. This characteristic makes him easy to take to and the reader tends to feel sympathy for him as he begins to reveal snippets of his life already lived. Such as the tragic death of his younger brother, Allie, who died of leukemia and also the suicide of one of his former classmates. Only a few pages into the book, you begin to see one of Holden’s most famous quirks - that is how judgmental he is of almost everyone and everything. At various points through the novel, his fondness for classifying people becomes quite hilarious. For example, when he gets into a rant after seeing “Fuck You” graffitied on a wall in his little sister’s school he explains that people are so crass that someone will probably scrawl the insult on his tombstone.
Further into the novel, we see that Holden’s judgmental demeanor and cynical outlook on almost everything life has to offer is really just a form of protection against, what he dubs, the superficial and hypocritical adult society. Its only after Phoebe, Holden’s little sister, is introduced in the novel that we truly see Holden as everything that he claims to hate; a phony. The plot of the novel seems to force Holden to realize his behaviors and acknowledge them as nothing more than a form of protection. He is eventually faced with the stunning realization that he is, in fact, no better than those he tends to isolate himself from.
Due to Holden’s severe case of arrogance he has little or no friends and the only person who he really regards highly is Mr Antolini, one of his ex-English teachers. He admires Mr. Antolini for his genuine concern that he has for his wellbeing. It is perhaps a little ironic then that one of the major climaxes in the novel sees Holden overreacting when Mr. Antolini pets his forehead while he sleeps. Holden flees Mr. Antolini’s apartment after obviously misinterpreting the gesture as a “homosexual pass”. Holden regrets his hasty judgment of Mr. Antolini, but this mistake is very important to him, because he finally starts to question his own practice of making snap judgments about people. Holden realizes that even if Mr. Antolini is gay, he can’t simply be dismissed as a “flit,” since he has also been kind and generous. Holden begins to acknowledge that Mr. Antolini is complex and that he has feelings.
The implied author, Holden, exposes us the reader with many different themes throughout the novel. I believe that the centre of the story is based around a misanthropist outlook and how this can develop into the complete isolation of a person, with only loneliness and misery to keep them company. Throughout the novel, Holden seems to be excluded from and victimized by the world around him. As he says to Mr. Spencer, he feels trapped on “the other side” of life, and he continually attempts to find his way in a world in which he feels he doesn’t belong. As the novel progresses, we begin to perceive that Holden’s alienation is his way of protecting himself. Just as he wears his red hunting hat to advertise his uniqueness, he uses his isolation as proof that he is better than everyone else around him and therefore above interacting with them. The truth is that interactions with other people usually confuse and overwhelm him, and his cynical sense of superiority serves as a type of self-protection. Thus, Holden’s alienation is the source of what little stability he has in his life. As readers, we can see that Holden’s alienation is the cause of most of his pain. He never addresses his own emotions directly, nor does he attempt to discover the source of his troubles. He desperately needs human contact and love, but his protective wall of bitterness prevents him from looking for such interaction. Alienation is both the source of Holden’s strength and the source of his problems. For example, his loneliness propels him into his date with Sally Hayes, but his need for isolation causes him to insult her and drive her away. Similarly, he longs for the meaningful connection he once had with Jane Gallagher, but he is too frightened to make any real effort to contact her. He depends upon his alienation, but it destroys him.
Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and bewilders him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children frolic and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. Holden explains that he imagines himself as the catcher in the field of rye; seizing children when they fall over the edge of innocence and plummet towards the abyss known as adulthood. His created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a protective armour of cynicism. But as the book progresses, Holden’s experiences, particularly his encounters with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the shallowness of his conceptions. “Phoniness,” which is probably the most famous phrase from The Catcher in the Rye, is one of Holden’s favourite concepts. It is his catch-all for describing the superficiality, hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world around him. In Chapter 22, just before he reveals his fantasy of the catcher in the rye, Holden explains that adults are inevitably phonies, and, what’s worse, they can’t see their own phoniness. But although Holden expends so much energy searching for phoniness in others, he never directly observes his own phoniness. His deceptions are generally pointless and cruel and he notes that he is a compulsive liar. For example, on the train to New York, he perpetrates a mean-spirited and needless prank on Mrs. Morrow. He’d like us to believe that he is a shining example of virtue in a world of phoniness, but that simply isn’t the case.
Although Holden would like to believe that the world is a simple place, and that good quality and innocence rest on one side of the fence while superficiality and phoniness rest on the other, Holden is the epitome of contradiction. The world is not as simple as he’d like and needs it to be; even he cannot stick to the same black-and-white standards with which he judges other people.
