The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye is one of those classics nearly everyone is forced to read in high school. Unfortunately, “classics” tend to get a bad reputation. Frankly, many of the supposed “classics” are boring and difficult to get through. However, The Catcher in the Rye, the novel written by J.D. Salinger, published in 1951, is not like the others.
The narrator of the story is Holden Caulfield, a teenager who just wants to tell us about a couple weeks of his life, and that is what he does. The writing is very simplistic, like Holden is your buddy, telling you a story over coffee. He is almost overly informal, frequently using profanity, and making countless sexual references or even blatantly talking about it. He really is a radical teen (or maybe that makes him just a regular teen), calling everyone around him “phony”, going to bars pretending to be over his age, leaving his prep school to roam the streets of New York City until his money runs out, and he has to return to his parents. Quite the rebel.
The Catcher in the Rye is really not something you expect your English teacher to hand to you. If you heard the title but knew nothing about the story, you would probably assume it really was about a boring old man catching butterflies or something else peculiar in a rye field. Yet, that is entirely untrue. It is not boring, nor peaceful. It is a book filled with the full force of a teenager (how frightening). In fact, I do not know how it got onto the list of classics. It seems unfitting and inappropriate, but perhaps that is exactly what makes it a classic. Certainly it was controversial when it was written, and it still is today.
Salinger crafted Holden Caulfield perfectly, he is a character you either come to love or hate. I ended up hating Caulfield, but somehow I loved the novel.
