Book of the Week

The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger
Conor Sinnott

J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye had sat in the periphery of my awareness for about two years and I had heard a smattering of details along the way: a sardonic adolescent plays hooky and kills time hanging around Manhattan.

I figured that I already knew so many teenagers who thought their wit was acerbic enough to land them an editor’s position at Private Eye that reading this novel that’s usually taught to fourteen year olds in the US would be a touch jejune. However, with my eighteenth birthday fast approaching, and the disarming reality of adulthood on its heels, I thought I might as well read it, if only for some puerile entertainment.
It exceeded every one of my expectations. Holden, the protagonist, is the nucleus of the piece, since Salinger’s world is seen through the eyes of his first person narration. But really there are two Holdens: the sixteen year old boy whose misadventures in New York are related to us, and the seventeen year old boy who narrates the tale. The differences between the two are not distinct as those between, say, a converted Ryder and the paganistic Charles in Brideshead Revisited, but the distance created allows older Holden and the reader to view younger Holden and his crude, mercurial worldview with a healthy degree of cynicism and composure; this makes reading a story from a teenager’s perspective bearable in the first place, but it does more than this. Older Holden is an ‘unreliable narrator’ but one of a certain ilk, where our discovery of his manipulation of the events and his flaws draws us closer to him as a character rather than further away.

This is for a few reasons. He is still young, and even though it would be a stretch to class the book as a Bildungsroman, we forgive his fallibility on account of his willingness to learn. Furthermore, from the very first sentence where he renounces 'all that David Copperfield kind of crap', it is difficult not to be won over by the same sarcasm that he uses to dress his failings. He is a charming hypocrite, with an abrasive irreverence that inspires pathos as we learn of the pain in his life that it shields. For example, he constantly rebukes the people around him and the world on account of its being 'phony' or disingenuous, whereas in other places he half boasts, half admits that he’s 'the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life'. In truth they are fibs, but we only write this off because of our sense that Holden’s aversion to giving his real name and opinions on others is rooted in his own low opinion of himself and betrayals by others. An ambiguous reference to sexual abuse and the death of his younger brother, whom he saw as far superior to him, surface naturally and so the reader’s sympathy is genuine. Salinger uses flippant hyperbole to overstate Holden’s anguish when it is superficial, while the moments of real pain and tenderness are understated and passed over. Holden’s persistent resistance to 'phonies' and being 'phony' keeps him from expressing himself too readily, but it also complicates almost all his interactions with the outside world.

Another one of the novel’s successes is how it encourages the reader to question Holden’s assumptions about the world, as well as one’s own. We have a handful of reasons for expecting that the mid-twentieth-century Manhattan he finds himself in is a treacherous environment: for one it follows the narrative cliché of a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed protagonist being disillusioned by a world ruled by violence and deceit.

We also have reason to believe Salinger might have shared this view himself, since he was drafted for WWII at an early age and very much fought on the front line. Notably, the first novel Salinger wrote upon returning from the war was not any kind of All Quiet on the Western Front; it was this novel. Lastly, a distinct feature of many of Holden’s interactions, whether it be with a taxi driver, a prostitute, a lift operator or his old roommates, is that people always seem to fail at listening. This seems to affirm Holden’s diagnosis of the world being filled with 'phonies', but things are not so simple.

The only character who plainly listens to him, with no ulterior motives, is his ten year-old sister Phoebe. Near the end of the novel, she calls Holden out for his dejected view of the world, saying 'You don't like anything that's happening'. This is the one character in the novel who really connects with him and who highlights something unsaid but clearly felt throughout, and yet only a few moments later we have this wonderful contradiction:

But she was listening, at least. If somebody at least listens, it's not too bad.

"Daddy's going to kill you. He's going to kill you," she said. I wasn't listening, though.

This complicates our whole understanding of this external world because Salinger brings Holden within a hair’s breadth of noticing the part he’s played in this miscommunication with others. The idea really resonates with the experiences of a modern-day teenager: endless, near misanthropic cynicism only helps you stay grounded insofar as it does not create its own kind of echo chamber, where one assumes an omniscience over the inner lives of others that becomes the bane of empathy. This does not absolve the more perfidious of the motley assortment of characters Holden encounters, but it resists any resignation into nihilism by stressing the duality of human interactions, the autonomy one actually has and the necessity for taking an active role in empathising and connecting with others. It takes two to tango.

All these interactions are relatively self-contained, varying in style and tone, but ultimately serve the purpose of reflecting back to the reader a more and more comprehensive picture of Holden. The structure is thus more episodic than linear, a seeming nod to Twain’s approach in his renowned, panoramic picaresque The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In one sense this makes the events feel more true to life, since the movement into adolescence swiftly illuminates how life ends up unfolding in various interlocking strands and patterns which occur and recur unpredictably. But the novel steers itself away from structurelessness by having the transition from innocence to disappointment, hope to apathy, confidence to fear, pervade his numerous experiences; it is distinct from Huck Finn in Salinger’s use of a more cyclical structure.

However, Holden is far from aware of this pattern, as his intention for almost all of the novel is to kill time and try to enjoy himself before his inevitable return home, where he expects to be subject to both immense rage and disappointment. This underscores Holden’s subtle but ever present awareness of death in the novel, from his response to his brother’s death to his frequent expression of amusement, 'That killed me'. The novel can feel dark in places, as Holden feels himself without a purpose helplessly hurtling towards death, potentially at his own hands. But it is at the end, when Holden watches Phoebe 'going around and around' on a merry-go-round that he comes to embrace the cyclical structure to life, signalling not futility but the perpetual flux of a world that causes at times dejection and others inspiration. He is a mentally troubled teenage truant watching his younger sister enraptured by a child’s ride. In this moment he professes that he 'felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth', a poignant glimpse at the genuine only accessed upon acknowledging life’s ambivalence.

In short: read this book. The irony of having approached this novel as if I knew all about it should be more than apparent to you now. Of the many things I picked up from reading it, that universal ebb and flow between ignorance and knowledge, and how you can learn something from anybody, sticks out as the most important.