“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”
Before I begin, I must confess–I tried to read this book a few years back and only got 20% of the way through before giving up. I don’t remember specifically why I stopped, just that I didn’t connect with the characters or the plot or the general angst imbued by Caulfield. However, I tried again, breezed past the 20% mark, and inhaled the book. The novel chronicles only two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield after he is expelled from his prep school, and yet provides an intimate and comprehensive look into loneliness, innocence, youth, and grief. It is a testament to a timeless teenage experience–when I told my mother that I was reading this book, she told me how she loved the book when she read it as a teenager in the 80s (and then proceeded to chide me for not reading this book years ago). The novel’s enduring appeal emphasizes its universality, how we all experience the pain of growing and adapting to the “phoniness” of the adult world in our own time and way.
I realize that many people read this book in high school and, while reading, probably fixated on how the Central Park pond that is partly frozen and partly not frozen is a symbol of the transition between childhood and adulthood, or about the symbol of Holden’s red hunting hat–the type of things that you pay attention to when you read in a formal academic setting and are aware that you may have to write a paper about the book later on. I didn’t really do that. I was fixated on Holden’s grief in regards to the passing of his brother, how Holden never called Sally because he wasn’t in the mood, how lonely Holden was even in a room full of people, how he desperately tried to hang on to his youth through Phoebe. How pointless everything seems sometimes in a world full of morons and phonies and people that don’t understand you. I didn’t really think about the hunting hat, beyond its practical purpose during winter in New York.
My mother had told me that I should have read this book years ago, back when I was a teenager–that made me feel uncomfortably old. And the person that recommended the book to me told me that they had read it as a teenager and saw themselves in Holden, navigating the uncomfortable and isolating teenage years. There is some truth in that–perhaps I would have connected with Holden more when I was younger. But then again, I tried reading this book when I was younger and never finished. And so, even though I read this book at the terribly old age of 21, I can still empathize with Holden’s struggles. I can still identify with the loneliness and the indecision and not feeling like you belong anywhere. Even if I am not currently experiencing everything that Holden goes through in the novel, the ability to acknowledge and empathize with his struggles is, and more importantly should be, ageless. We all experience the tension between childhood and adulthood and we all know how difficult it was during that period. Escaping the tension does not give us the right to forget and ignore the struggles of those caught in this in-between. Growing up does not give us the right to look down on the struggles of youth, despite what some reviewers online say. To quote J.K. Rowling, “Youth can not know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.” It’s one thing to read this book when you are sixteen and feel like you are less alone. It’s another, but equally important, thing to read this book when you are older (and not 21 either) and recognize that while some of the angst may feel slightly juvenile or dramatized, you were once sixteen and to age is to not forget the perspective and struggles of the young.
A completely unrelated but interesting aside: Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon, had two things on his person at the time of the assassination: a pistol and a paperback copy of “The Catcher in the Rye”. After pleading guilty, Chapman was asked by the judge if he had anything to say. Chapman read the following passage from the novel to the court: “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.”)
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