The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

To date, this is the only Salinger work I have read, although Franny and Zooey sits on the shelf, waiting.

Talking about this book entails talking about how I talked about this book when I was fifteen. Most people I've spoken to read this book when they were teenagers. For some reason, someone somewhere decided that The Catcher in the Rye was a piece of literature that should be "gotten out of your system" as early as possible. There is a cultural air of danger around this novel, but its only threat is that it requires a repeat read.

When you are fifteen, Holden Caulfield is just a little too easy to identify with. So easy, in fact, that the book doesn't feel like the masterpiece it really is. Everyone but you is a phony, everyone but you is an idiot, everyone but you is cruel, everyone but you "doesn't get it." Regular aphorisms of American youth. Sentiments that are, at this point, mundane. Catcher most likely had a hand in cultivating this mentality, but when the outsider mentality becomes the norm, how threatening can we really consider Holden?

I found the book was providing different messages when I read it last month than I did when I read it at fifteen. Yes, everyone is still a bunch of phonies, idiots, and cads. I would like to meet the well-educated person who has been able to completely eradicate this kind of sentiment from their thoughts. However, Holden's contradictory behavior sheds a more important light on these opinions.

The anti-phony is a phony. He lies, he tricks, he's dishonest. He's the hypocrite of the modern world. So what becomes intriguing about him is no longer that he's an outcast. Instead, his character is interesting because he shows us what kind of personal failures will keep up in the mentality of a teenager.

Holden suffers from a severe lack of introspection. His declarative statements about other people never result in self-examination of character or behavior. He is so focused on what is out there that he becomes severely detached from himself. He is so out of touch with his own body and mind that he misinterprets a hangover as just depression. He is quick to tell the reader what he hates and what he likes, but he never asks himself, "Why do I hate this and like that?" or "Why do I say I hate these qualities, and then express them myself?"

It is as though, like for most people, the horrible truth of the world is easier to digest than the horrible truth of oneself.

To introspect, to turn one's cynicism onto yourself, is discouraged in today's society. After all, it might lead to anxiety or depression, or something else that would require a pill. Therapy is still a dirty word to most people, and understanding your own motives is highly underrated as a means of bettering oneself, if not merely learning more about the human condition.

Holden is less of a hero and more of a warning. He is the voice of the fifteen-year-old still rambling away in the corner of your brain. We may never be able to get rid of him, and we may not want to. He has moments of insight, and his casual tone takes existential frustrations out of the hands of the philosophers and puts them in the hands of the man-on-the-street. It is important that we move past Holden, however. Not destroy him, but see him for what he is.