The Catcher in the Rye: Overview
Author(s): Mollie Sandock
Source: Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. From LiteratureResourceCenter.
When J.D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, it met with mixed reviews but soon became a tremendous success among young people, who felt that Salinger was speaking to them directly. The novelist Joan Didion reports meeting a typical Salinger fan in 1956, a young woman from Sarah Lawrence who declared that Salinger was the only person in the world capable of understanding her. In the 1960s members of the youth culture who read Salinger's later stories hoping to find enlightenment in the conversations of the Glass family continued to read Catcher as a testament to the emptiness of the "establishment." Today the novel is more often assigned in English courses than passed from friend to friend, but it continues to find a number of enthusiastic readers outside the classroom.
The Catcher in the Rye has been read both as the story of a neurotic who cannot make the "adjustments" necessary to adult life and as the story of an outsider who can see clearly, with the vision of a child or a saint, the horrors of mid-century American life which are not visible to those comfortably ensconced within it. The novel is a long monologue by Holden Caulfield, who tells the story of "this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas," the events of three days in a bleak, loveless New York City, where Holden has fled after flunking out of his third prep school. He is in flight from what he sees as the unbearably "phony" world of prep school snobbery, stupidity, and cruelty, and from a future in which he can do no more than "make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot."
Holden is an outcast like Huck Finn, and like Huck he tells his story in his own idiom. Holden's voice is not merely a virtuoso re-creation of contemporary adolescent speech. His profanity reflects his experience of a "goddam"-ed life, a "hell." He repeatedly insists that he is telling the truth ("I really did," "It really is") because in his experience and by his rigorous standards, most people do not speak the truth. He prefaces his revelations with "if you really want to hear about it," "if you really want to know," and "if you want to know the truth," because he has found that few people do want to know the truth.
Holden feels a scathing, harrowing disgust for the "phoniness" he senses so acutely all around him. It makes him literally ill. He is repulsed not only by the insincerity and self-promotion of the "phonies," "hot-shots," "jerks," "bastards," and "morons," but by the phoniness that is excellence corrupted: Holden's brother D.B., the Lunts, and Ernie the piano player are corrupted by the success of what they do well. Holden himself is implicated in the pretense that so disgusts him; we see him do those things for which he castigates others, and he is half-aware of the fact. But in the midst of his revulsion he is moved by pity and forgiving love for the people who appall him.
His story is full of failed attempts to communicate, messages never delivered, uncompleted phone calls, overtures not taken up, appeals repulsed. William Faulkner, who praised the novel, said that when Holden "attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there." In his great trouble, Holden attempts to address serious questions to Mr. Spencer, to Sally Hayes, to Carl Luce, to Mr. Antolini; no one can really hear him. All interchanges prove sour and barren. When Holden despairs of ever getting through to anybody, he decides in furious disgust to run away and stop trying: "I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody."
One literal message does get delivered: Holden's note to his little sister Phoebe, significantly, does reach her. Phoebe receives the message, and she is the only one who listens to him. And it is Phoebe, finally, who brings Holden back to some unresolved relationship with the world he is fleeing. At his lowest point in the novel, alone in the defaced mummies' tomb in the museum, he ascends to find her dragging a heavy suitcase, begging to run away with him; he finds that he cannot be responsible for taking her away from what she finds hopeful and good even in the world he so distrusts.
Holden wishes that Phoebe could remain safe in beautiful and innocent childhood; this feeling is allied to his grief for his brother Allie who died at ten, Phoebe's age. He wants what is "nice" to be proof against change; he dreams of saving children from falling "over the cliff" into the adult world, so much of which disgusts him. Phoebe's redeeming love makes him realize that he cannot keep her from "falling": "The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it.... If they fall off, they fall off...." It is not at all clear whether Holden can (or should) compromise with the life expected of him, but he will not lure Phoebe into total retreat, and she saves him from it.
Source Citation: Sandock, Mollie. "The Catcher in the Rye: Overview." Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. LiteratureResourceCenter. Gale. NorthPennHigh School. 29 Apr. 2009 <