Get a Life, Holden Caulfield

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/weekinreview/21schuessler.html?ref=books

by robg • 17 years ago

28 25 17 years ago

nytimes.com

rnernento• 17 years ago

Kind of depressing... If we're replacing Holden Caulfield with Harry Potter I'm worried.

ramidarigaz• 17 years ago

I dunno... I enjoyed Catcher, but I see it as being less and less relevant these days. Call it social evolution.

I feel old now...

zimbabwe6• 17 years ago

I'd be worried if Harry Potter was replacing Holden, but the two can stand proudly side-by-side. The alienation in Harry Potter may not be as overwhelming as it is in Catcher, but it's probably even more pervasive in how it illustrates the world as a relatively amoral place where few people care about others for the sake of caring. The Goblet of Fire marked a moment when a whole generation of kids suddenly got a lot older.

jdp• 17 years ago

Did teachers in the 1950's feel the same way about Caulfield as teachers feel now about Potter? I'm sure they did, and I'm just as sure that in 2050 Potter will be just as dated children will have just as much trouble relating.

zandorg• 17 years ago

Reading it depressed me because he was having such a good time.

The film (and moreso, the book) Wonderboys I think depicts young academia brilliantly, much better than Catcher. It has the crazy mentor (which I also had) which Catcher lacks.

100k• 17 years ago

Having read Catcher in the Rye later in life (in my 20s rather than as a teenager) and rather enjoying it, I find this interesting.

I do think the millennials are more integrated into society than the Gen Xers or earlier Gen Ys who were more interested in rebelling. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the millennials come of age.

zitterbewegung3• 17 years ago

As a millennial (born 1988) I enjoyed the book but I was unhappy that we couldn't finish the book in class for some reason (time constraints?). I want to rebel against some of my parents values but I am primarily more concerned about getting a college degree and integrating into society.

misuba• 17 years ago

The kids who show up in this article are framed to sound callow and shallow. I'm suspicious. I want to hear more from them directly.

What does it say about the author of this piece, and her generation, that she seems to think teens (and the rest of us) should want to be miserable? Hell, I can't prove that we shouldn't, but that's no reason to assume it.

zimbabwe6• 17 years ago

It's depressing to see Catcher In The Rye continually misinterpreted. Salinger's fault for being so obscure, perhaps, but I blame English teachers for not explaining the book well.

The "Catcher In The Rye" is a snippet Holden Caulfield mishears from a poem about two children growing up and having sex. He thinks it's about catching children who are falling out of the field, protecting people from growing up, when in fact it's the opposite. His sister points this out to him when he takes her from their home.

The point of Catcher is that Holden is wrong. He thinks he's being bold and brave and telling the truth and rebelling, when in fact he's too young to know anything. The moral is supposed to be that we all make mistakes and think we're the heroes, but that eventually we all grow up.

But that's not taught anymore, so instead we have a bunch of whiny kids idolizing that book and a bunch of people who ought to appreciate it all thinking it's whiny. Salinger's better than he's given credit for. Again I blame schools.

zitterbewegung3• 17 years ago

Your right, my teacher didn't tell us this interpretation in my school. The book makes more sense now.

micks56• 17 years ago

I will add another interpretation from my HS English teacher: whether anything in the book actually happened.

Read the first page: "Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam [sic] autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy."

Holden is in a mental hospital. This is confirmed on the last page [approx.] of the book.

"I could probably tell you what I did after I went home, and how I got sick and all, and what school I'm supposed to go to next fall, after I get out of here."

From that, Holden is in the hospital. The last line of the book says, "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

From what I remember, this means that Holden made up all of those stories. His family realized he was crazy because they know none of those things actually happened, put him in the hospital, and now he doesn't get to see his family or friends very often.

GHFigs• 17 years ago

I concur. It isn't taught well.

The interpretation presented to me in school was that Holden was simply unwell and that anyone experiencing the kind of angst and alienation described in the book is sick and will end up in a mental hospital. As if it were a cautonary tale against having negative thoughts and feelings.

I didn't buy it at the time, but it was only years later that I realized just how much was lost in reading it that way.

zach2• 17 years ago

Yeah, and maybe this is the point of American Beauty and Donnie Darko as well, but not in one of them can I get past the insufferable protagonist. I just can't appreciate stories I wish were over already, even if they are actually brilliant critiques of the personalities depicted therein.

zimbabwe6• 17 years ago

The difference is that The Catcher In The Rye is well-written, whereas American Beauty is tripe, and Donnie Darko is low-budget tripe. AB overstates everything and generally treats its audience like idiots (and hey, it won an Academy Award for that), and Donnie Darko is incredibly incoherent and so withstands every possible interpretation.

Compare that to the titular scene from Catcher In The Rye:

"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like — "

"It's 'If a body meet* a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."*

"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."

She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though.

"I thought it was 'If a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. 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."

It suffers from being out of context, but basically Holden - the first talker - is talking with Phoebe about his life, and it's really immaculately done. Listen to his words. He doesn't come across as a phony-hating phony. He's just a confused guy trying to talk to his sister. The dialogue is a little dated in its construction, but it's still concise and powerful and it does pretty much exactly what it's trying to do. He mentions he wants to catch these children, but at the same time the narrator's admitting that he was wrong about this when he said it. And he doesn't come across as a douche, he comes across as a scared college student. The "douche" interpretation comes from people who skimmed the book and resented it from the beginning. I had that attitude for a while. It's not fair to the book.

In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey is an over-the-top pervert whose death was completely welcomed. In Donnie Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal is filthily melodramatic. Holden Caulfield, though, is really easy to sympathize with. He's not at all a broken, cliched character. It's hard even to call him cliched when you look directly at the soliloquy lines. Here are two samples from around the same part in the book:

The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they'll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don't like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they'll say he's conceited. Even smart girls do it.

The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.

This isn't just Salinger writing "Oh man I hate how fake people are". It's him providing this view of the world again from this frustrated kid. And he's pessimistic about it and you can read the book as saying he's wrongly pessimistic - I do - but his pessimism isn't at all melodramatic and you can read Catcher In The Rye without it catching you up at all. I read it for the story: The leave from college, the search for his family, the incident with the hooker, are all really moving and engaging bits of story, and Holden's frustration is accurate enough that you can sympathize it even when you disagree with him.

If you look at "Catcher" as a critique of Holden Caulfield, you're still doing the book a disservice. Catcher In The Rye is first and foremost a story, and if you try reading it without analyzing it you'll probably find that it holds up terrific even when it's not a part of literature. That's the part of these books that all this analysis ignores: The point is always to tell a story, and the rest of this is just the icing on top.

Tichy2• 17 years ago

So growing up == having sex?

zimbabwe6• 17 years ago

In Holden's mind, yes. I'll assume you've read the book - if not, it really is a fun one to read, not stuffy in the least. But Holden is really nervous of women and of sex. There's the famous (in my mind) scene with the hooker, where he chickens out of having sex with her, because he reasons, perhaps rightly so, that sex with a hooker is unclean. But that's the attitude he has towards sex in general, not just towards hookers. (You could call it ironic that Holden's right in his particular case, but I haven't read the book in years so I couldn't make a strong argument for that.)

To Holden, being this pure, innocent child figure is the ultimate manner of living, and that's why he loves Phoebe so much - he sees her as this embodiment of what he wishes he was. The irony there is that Phoebe is the girl who reveals to Holden that he's got this whole catcher in the rye thing wrong, and that while he's trying to stop from growing up, this poem that resonates so much with him is about growing up. It just happens to use sex as its metaphor for growing old, which is a metaphor Catcher borrows for its plot.

michael_dorfman• 17 years ago

I've noticed three distinct stages in the reader's response to the character's response to Holden, generally related to the age of the reader:

1) "Holden's so cool-- I'm just like him" 2) "Holden's a loser-- I'm nothing like him" 3) "Holden's a loser-- I was just like him"

From the article, it appears that the teenagers reading the book these days are jumping straight to the second stage. I hope they re-read it when they are a decade or two older.

indraneel24• 17 years ago

I just read this book for the first time, in my American Literature class, and as my fellow peers read it, I heard them remark that Holden was "annoying and whiny."

Personally, having looked up a lot of the symbolism in the novel on my own, I truly enjoy <em>Catcher</em> and all the life lessons it teaches. I, at times, related to Holden, even through all his inconsistencies and flaws. It's an excellent book and I hope teachers understand how to teach it better at their "work"shops.

neilk• 17 years ago

Holden Caulfield is an Establishment figure's idea of a rebellious youth. Privileged life, no real problems, whiny about small hypocrisies, ambivalent about sex, and deep down he wishes to return to innocence.

This has become the acceptable image of youthful discontent, the one that educational institutions prescribe for their students.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

(Disclaimer: I haven't read Catcher) Maybe this is just the inevitable phase change for Catcher in the Rye, from beloved literature to stodgy bullcrap your English teacher thinks is awesome. I mean, I'm sure people loved Ethan Frome and Wuthering Heights at some point, but I just think they're miserable books about miserable people being miserable to each other and, subsequently, making the entire world more miserable.

Which is not to say that I find all classic literature terrible. Just some of it.

Tichy2• 17 years ago

"Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and hyperactive pop culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry Potter"

What a completely random sentence.

Get a Life, Holden Caulfield

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