But also, who can't relate to a kid who drops out of school because he wants to read on a Saturday night and his dormitory is filled with debauching teenage boys? As a character who has been equally critiqued for being overly-introspective, the Holden I became reacquainted with as an adult was painfully aware of how awkward, obnoxious, and out-of-place he was.
Latergram is evergreen for only so long, people. A common complaint against J. But is Holden flat out resisting growing up, or does his "dream job" actually demonstrate an understanding that the entire world is going to hell in a handbasket, and he just wants to save his fellow youth from their fate?
Within the confines of the book, in other words, Salinger is more or less in control of his ironies. Holden is not a saint, but he is certainly a writer. He blows off every class except English, fantasizes about talking with Thomas Hardy, and so on. Writers of any kind secretly know that they, too, are childish, irritating, self-involved—but always desperate to stay on the side of the angels.
Skip to content. Austin Allen. Share Is Holden Caulfield Obnoxious? Should we worry about fascist politics? Jason Stanley. When I was about to graduate college at 21 and feeling that morphine drip of nostalgia that accompanies points of departure in youth, I read Catcher again in search of my old friend. It was like bumping into an old crush and realising that everything you ever liked about them was a projection.
I no longer read to find friends in literature — I read for the writing. So when I recently read the book for the fourth time, I saw something brand new and I think closer to what Salinger intended: a perfectly written portrait of an imperfect character. Every syllable sings.
Much of what I saw in this fourth reading, I had completely missed before. Which puts Catcher in a bit of a Catch He has everyone pegged. He seems and this is why his character can be so addictive to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life. So, presumably, is Hamlet. But his sense that everything is worthless is just the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies.
Life starts to seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about death; they lose their taste for it. To be these things is almost their only resource in a world where parents and schoolmasters have all the power and the experience. Actually, Holden is in flight from mendacity rather than in search of truth, and his sensitivity to the failures of the world is compounded with his self-disgust.
In comparison with his dear, dead brother, Allie, a kind of redheaded saint who united intelligence and compassion as no other member of the family could, setting for all a standard of performance which they try to recapture, Holden seems intolerant, perhaps even harsh. The controlling mood of the novel—and it is so consistent as to be a principle of unity—is one of acute depression always on the point of breaking loose. These contrary pressures keep the actions of the novel in tension and keep the theme of sentimental disenchantment on the stretch; and they are sustained by a style of versatile humor.
Holden, of course, is not in the least cynical; nor is he blind except to part of the truth which he can otherwise entertain so steadily. Still, there are those who feel that the novel accords no recognition to its hero and that it fails to enlist our sense of tragedy.
The lack of recognition, the avoidance of conversion and initiation, is almost as inherent in the structure of the novel as it is consonant with the bias of the American novel of adolescence. Holden does succeed in making us perceive that the world is crazy, but his vision is also a function of his own adolescent instability, and the vision, we must admit, is more narrow and biased than that of Huck Finn, Parson Adams, or Don Quixote.
It is this narrowness that limits the comic effects of the work. Funny it is without any doubt, and in a fashion that has been long absent from American fiction.
But we must recall that true comedy is informed by the spirit of compromise, not intransigence; Huck Finn and Augie March are both, in this sense, closer to the assumption of comedy than Holden Caulfield. This once understood, we can see how The Catcher in the Rye is both a funny and terrifying work—traditional distinctions of modes have broken down in our times—a work full of pathos in the original sense of the word.
Adventure is precisely what Holden does not endure; his sallies into the world are feigned his sacrificial burden, carried with whimsey and sardonic defiance, determined by his fate. The fate is that of the American rebel-victim.
Howard Bloom, in his introduction to J. Rereading The Catcher in the Rye seems to me an aesthetically mixed experience—sometimes poignant, sometimes mawkish or even cloying.
And yet Holden retains his pathos, even upon several rereadings. Holden is seventeen in the novel, but appears not to have matured beyond thirteen, his age when Allie died.
The dilemma, being spiritual, hurts many among us, and is profoundly American. Holden speaks for our skepticism, and for our need. That is a large burden for so fragile a literary character, and will turn out eventually to be either aesthetic salvation for The Catcher in the Rye , or a prime cause for its dwindling down to the status of a period piece.
There are very ambiguous elements, moreover, in the portrait of this sad little screwed-up hero. The only real creation or half-creation in this world is Holden Caulfield himself.
If this hero really represents the nonconformist rebellion of the Fifties, he is a rebel without a past, apparently, and without a cause. There is no point in multiplying examples, Holden obviously fails to see that his criticisms apply to himself.
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