Once I start reading this book, I can’t put it down. That was the case when I first read it in high school, and that was the case when I re-read it recently. I can certainly see why I liked the book so much as a teenager. The first-person narrative of a smart, perceptive boy coming of age in a “phony” society describes his thoughts, memories, and desires, as a few manic days play out after he is kicked out of boarding school. The writing is so great that you really do feel like you’re experiencing Holden’s life. Everything is magnified and crisp.
Reading the book now, though, I do feel a sense of distance from the book and from my own teenage years. “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” Teenage self-destruction is usually not without a point. I remember hating materialism and money and oil and fighting for oil. Funny how things seem so similar today. These problems still exist, but my approach to them is very different now. I have learned to “live humbly” and try to actually make a difference through my own actions.
The larger theme of The Catcher in the Rye is that most people feel like they have to act like jerks to be “grown up.” Growing up is losing innocence and the losing the ability to genuinely be yourself and live in the moment. This is a story of Holden choosing to act like a child, and ending up in a mental hospital, but the irony is, that in growing up, we loose ourselves jumping through hoops and acting like we know what we’re talking about. The novel is a sarcastic stab at the way the world works. The mental hospital is society’s way of saying they know what they’re talking about, and you’re crazy. They have it all figured out because they watched the news yesterday.
Holden hates how fake everything is in the world. The movies annoy him. The everyday actions people go through annoy him. Even people’s trite dreams annoy him. I enjoy the way this phony-ness is described, and I enjoy the way Holden deals with it through his creative, dark, sarcastic sense of humor. He gets into a fight with his roommate, Stradlater, because he thinks he has put the moves on a girl he likes. Holden has a more genuine relationship with the girl, based on spending time together playing checkers and being silly, rather than on a date trying to impress her. The thought of Stradlater using her to get what he wants drives him crazy, yet Holden realizes that he has this instinct within himself also.
Holden describes magazine stories: “You know. One of those stories with a lot of phony, lean-jawed guys named David in it, and a lot of phony girls named Linda or Marcia that are always lighting all the goddam Davids’ pipes for them.” He has a similar tone describing married life: “And I’d be working in some office making a lot of dough, and riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers, and playing bridge all the time, and going to the movies and seeing a lot of stupid shorts and coming attractions and newsreels. Newsreels. Christ almighty. There’s always a dumb horse race, and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship, and some chimpanzee riding a goddam bicycle with pants on…”
Later in the book Holden formulates a possible solution to living in the fake world: “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. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life. Everybody’d think I was just a poor deaf-mute bastard and they’d leave me alone. They’d let me put gas and oil in their stupid cars, and they’d pay me a salary and all for it, and I’d build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life… I’d meet this beautiful girl that was also deaf-mute and we’d get married.”
When Holden is manic going around to night clubs, he goes to a club his older brother frequents where there’s a hip piano player he knows, Ernie. The piano player is good, but he has lost his art by pleasing the audience. He adds “show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass.” The crowd really admired Ernie. “They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny.” Ernie is not humble, he is not genuine, he is not an artist, and he’s not happy.
The image that the title of the book refers to gives a big clue to the meaning of the book. Holden is talking with Phoebe, his little sister, and he says that he wishes he could be the catcher in the rye. He wishes he could be the person who stands in the field of rye and catches the children if they start to fall over the cliff. The children falling over the cliff is a metaphor for growing up. Holden wants to catch them so that they don’t loose themselves as they become adults. That’s the one thing he wants to do. He wants people to keep their humble, childlike innocence. The hard crash at the bottom of the cliff usually triggers a big ego that prevents people from seeing reality and living genuinely.
