Why Is Catcher in the Rye Required Reading
The Catcher in the Rye
Publication details ▽ Publication details △
Offset publication
1951
Literature class(s)
Novel
Genres
Literary
Writing language
English language
Writer'south country
United states of america
Length
Approx. 76,000 words
The Catcher in the Rye
THE NOVEL | THE TEXT
Some get caught and some don't
Few novels divide readers as The Catcher in the Rye does.
This may audio like a bizarre thing to say, since J.D. Salinger'southward novel has been wildly popular since it came out in 1951. Information technology's been lauded as changing the grade of post-Second Globe War writing—at to the lowest degree American writing—every bit much every bit Ernest Hemingway'south work did in the inter-state of war catamenia. Tens of millions of copies of Catcher take been sold and hundreds of thousands more every twelvemonth. Globally acclaimed, information technology would appear.
Yet, from my discussions with my swain great unwashed masses, I've learned that a lot of people only don't get it.
And it's non their fault. Nor the error of the writer.
Those who don't get The Catcher in the Rye are non making the kind of complaint you hear from folks almost James Joyce's Ulysses or Tolstoy's War and Peace or fifty-fifty older classics like whatever of Dickens. Catcher is not a difficult modernist read, nor a dauntingly heavy book, nor a novel total of archaically convoluted descriptions and allusions that only literary or academic types could fathom. Rather, it'south a relatively brusque, colloquial, breezy read that anyone can follow.
In a fashion, we can follow information technology too easily. Nothing much seems to happen. We go through a few days in the life of a spoiled rich child who is expelled from prep school in New York and wanders around town criticizing everyone, "phonies" all of them, and feeling lamentable for himself. Every at present and and so he gets sentimental almost someone—a kindly teacher, an erstwhile girlfriend, his younger sis—simply is chop-chop disillusioned. And in the end, for all his supposed rebellion, he is poised to have upwardly his office again as a son of the privileged course.
At that place seems nothing farther to get. If you come to the novel having heard it's a corking work of social criticism, yous're bound to be disappointed. How profound or incisive can the interior carping of a self-centred twerp be?
To such disappointed readers, I can simply say, "Yes, yous've got a point." At that place are reasons The Catcher in the Rye doesn't speak to you. Maybe information technology's non destined to become ane of the dandy universal classics of American lit upward in that location with Huckleberry Finn. In fact, I doubtable the legions of its dismissers will grow the further we get from the zeitgeist of the mid-to-late twentieth century.
But let's look at why, at least in its own era, it'due south been such a sensation.
Of principal importance is its manner and what scholars refer to as its voice. Correct from the first line, Salinger serves notice this story is non going to exist presented like anything its readers had ever read before. The line dispensing with "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" heralds both a new kind of story structure (specifically non a Dickens-style coming-of-historic period story) and a new kind of language to tell the story. Lots of writers had used profane speech before, but few had made this an entire novel. Salinger sustains the profane, boyish tone of Holden Caulfield as narrator through almost the entire novel, without a imitation note struck in more than than two hundred pages. Today, with generations of scribes having copied this play a trick on, it'southward hard to realize what an astounding feat this was back and then.
Caulfield'southward verbal tics have provided material for parodies: tagging sentences with vague phrases similar "and all" and "if yous desire to know the truth", overusing "phonies", putting "former" earlier people's names, spicing it up with weak expletives like "goddam" and "for God's sake"—and everything "driving me crazy". Salinger is hands satirized for lines like "People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam ill of it." The kind of lines you probably learn in writing school to rewrite with more concrete imagery. Vague but meaningful to anyone on the same wavelength every bit Holden.
They put me in mind of some of the purposefully inarticulate lyrics of John Lennon as in Strawberry Fields Forever years later: "Always know, sometimes think it's me / Merely y'all know I know when information technology'due south a dream / I think a no I mean a yep / But it's all wrong / That is, I think I disagree." (Although Lennon's tragic connectedness with The Catcher in the Rye is another painful matter entirely.)
Ripped from their minds
Some critics have complained about the novel's unimaginative, often flat sentences, as if they show the author'south a bad author. They're missing the point. Of course, J.D. Salinger could have written the story more creatively—but Holden Caulfield couldn't. Salinger shows incredible field of study really in sticking to the kid's voice, even when he's inarticulate.
And and so when the kid does bear witness tremendous sensitivity and insight, expressed in the vulgar language that more refined writers of sensitivity and insight don't use...well, information technology'due south magical. Information technology strikes the reader, or at least a sure kind of reader, as all the more real.
I call back this is why The Catcher in the Rye has defenseless the affection of so many rebellious young people, including some famously unhinged killers. Many novels accept critiqued modern society and its citizenry, but few, if any, in the kind of language that makes those readers feel the thoughts are ripped from their own minds.
But I think this likewise explains why not anybody feels this mode nigh The Catcher in the Rye. If they are not the kinds of thoughts you already have and if Caulfield'southward voice does non resemble yours to some extent, and then the language tin get out you unimpressed. Or it impresses you in the manner that someone doing accents tin impress you without moving yous.
Of grade, the novel's actual critiques of people and upper centre-class urban life are also important to the novel's reception, particularly by the cynical. Salinger is a deeply contemptuous writer. It's been suggested in some quarters that Catcher is actually a novel of mail service-traumatic stress, that Caulfield experiences school and New York as Salinger had experienced the state of war, wandering both battlefields in shock, uncomprehendingly, in need of help to pull themselves together again and go on as soldiers/citizens.
Interesting idea, but I find Caulfield's caustic take on his loonshit of activeness much more than juvenile than might be expected of a soldier. Norman Mailer (who wrote a real state of war novel) called Salinger the "greatest mind always to stay in prep schoolhouse." The first time I heard this I thought it was just a bitchy comment from a rival writer but it's grown on me as a general explanation of at least The Catcher in the Rye.
This is not necessarily a criticism. Salinger creates Caulfield every bit a prep school rebel. The perspective in the novel is that of the character, who has never got beyond this teenage globe view. Salinger fabricated a masterful piece of work of information technology. Which, by no means, is to imply anyone should take it—or less to human action on it—as a mature statement of the way the world is.
I expect, as time goes past, people may be able to run across this more clearly and let the novel take its place as a minor classic of its time that had an outsize result on literature to come.
— Eric McMillan
THE NOVEL | THE TEXT
Source: http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/books/Catcher-in-the-Rye.html
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