Is Catcher in the Rye Outdated? (A Goodreads.com Conversation)

(From the "Most Overrated Books" Discussion, 12/31/14)

The Catcher in the Rye has been criticized as outdated because modern schoolkids can't relate to what has been described as a "spoiled rich kid" from the 1950s. The following conversation lifted from a discussion on Goodreads.com addresses this issue.


Cemre: Why do you think Catcher [in the Rye] saw such a huge backlash ?

I mean there are so many articles all over the internet about it aging badly. Words "spoiled rich kid" are frequently used, but then aren't most of the main characters of classics are rich ? Why is Catcher the biggest victim of this ? Is it because it is easy to read or is there any other reason that ı can't understand ?

Mochaspresso: Perhaps it's that the internet reaches the reader before the actual book does and influences their perceptions of it? It could also be that other literature, films and music have reached that reader and shaped their pov before the novel. I know of people who read it for the first time because of the movie, "Six Degrees of Separation". I also knew people who read the novel for the first time because it was mentioned in a Green Day song. I haven't read this particular book, but I read an article that claimed that the book "The Collector" references "The Catcher in the Rye" rather negatively.

Cemre: Yes Mocha. Even stranger, people sometimes have negative perceptions of a book without actually reading it, based solely on its representation in popular media. Furthermore, their expectations of the novel can colour their reading and even then, it's arguable if they had actually read it.

I haven't read The Collector, but ı've gazed through it in a book fair, mainly for finding that passage (yes, I'm obsessed.) If ı've understood it correctly, a girl recommends it to a man, because she thinks that man can identify with Holden, but the man doesn't like it because Holden is a rich prep kid who didn't suffer as much as he did, etc. etc. Same thing.

Books sometimes have cultural reputations that doesn't have anything to do with the actual text. People come CitR expecting a novel of a rebellion, a book that inspired the killing of a rockstar, a life changing manifesto. What they find is the life story of a confused 16 years old boy who have lost his little brother. This might have disappointed a lot of them, and made them to see it as worse than it actually is, despite the fact that Catcher is rather good at the thing it's trying to do.

Monty:  <Cemre wrote: "Why do you think Catcher saw such a huge backlash ?">

Two reasons. First, I believe the backlash reflects present political realities. Holden representsthe privileged 1%. Wealth and income disparity are reaching new highs every year and there's growing frustration and unrest among the poor and Middle Class who feel victimized by the job-destroying Mitt Romneys and Kochs who pull the strings behind the curtains of government and industry.

I am afraid that Holden has, unfairly, become a literary insult to those suffering the grim realities and hopelessness of the economic disparities of this age.

The second major reason, I suspect, is psychological. The book deals with the transition from juvenile to adulthood, a transition that young readers are still experiencing when they read it for the first time. I suspect reading about yourself as you are struggling with vital issues of personality development can feel theatening. It's also about a guy, and girls have their own issues.

Additionally, many older readers are still wrestling with unresloved issues of an incomplete transition to adulthood themselves. Many were forced by parental expectations into unfulfilling roles and careers, and the book reminds them of it.

A book that sells this well is an easy target. Expect the attacks to grow until the economics and politics reverse their present course. The other issues are timeless, and for this reason CiTR can never become outdated. Attacked for socio-political reasons, but never outdated.

Cemre: Is Holden 1% though ? USA is one of the richest countries in the world, Holden's family seems to do well, but can they represent 1% of United States of America ? Wasn't Holden's father a lawyer? I'm sure they're doing rather well, but c'mon ı don't think they eat money? There has to be richer characters in American fiction.

Monty: <Cemre wrote: "Is Holden 1% though ? USA is one of the richest countries in the world, Holden's family seems to do well, but can they represent 1% of United States of America ? Wasn't Holden's father a lawyer? ...">

True, but corporate lawyers are major facilitators of the Kochs and Romneys, and they're paid immensely well for it. They write the legislation that chains us. They sit on the Supreme Court that redefined money as speech.

It is perception that matters, and Holden, merely by attending prep school, represents that privileged class.

Salinger In the CIC With Henry Kissinger

Salinger served in the CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) during The Battle of the Bulge in World War II. He was responsible for interviewing captured German soldiers as well local civilians, friend or foe. Did he witness torture and if so how did he handle it? How much was he willing to face and share, or was allowed to? War does things to the mind. His mind failed under the relentless pressure of trauma after trauma. After having thoughts of self harm, he submitted to psychiatric care. After recovering, he volunteered to return for more. He was cited for valor more than a couple of times, a bonifide hero.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also served in the CIC and the Battle of the Bulge. It would be interesting to know if their paths crossed during those assignments, for which they both received medals for valor. Here's the relevant Wikipedia quote about Kissinger in the CIC: 

"Kissinger was reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division. There, he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, a fellow immigrant from Germany who ...arranged for him to be assigned to the military intelligence section of the division. Kissinger saw combat with the division and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge."

Further Wikipedia comments about the CIC:

"In the European and Pacific theaters of operations CIC deployed detachments at all levels. These detachments provided tactical intelligence about the enemy from captured documents, interrogations of captured troops, and from para-military and civilian sources. They were also involved in providing security for military installations and staging areas, located enemy agents, and acted to counter stay-behind networks. They also provided training to combat units in security, censorship, the seizure of documents, and the dangers of booby traps. In some cases CIC agents found themselves acting as the de facto military government on the occupation of large towns before the arrival of Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT) officers. As the war in Europe came to a close, CIC were involved in the Operations Alsos, Paperclip and TICOM, searching for German personnel and research in atomic weapons, rockets and cryptography. Recruits after World War II included Klaus Barbie, also known as the 'Butcher from Lyon', a former Gestapo member and war criminal."

After recovering from shell shock, Salinger volunteered to return to postwar Germany and hunt war criminals. He married a woman and later had the marriage annulled. She was a Nazi. Did he marry her for Intelligence reasons or did he truly love her? 

Salinger's war record was so highly personal we can understand why he had to lock himself away for long periods. It meant going deep and facing shame and trauma, and facing trauma can be re-traumatizing. This is why many combat veterans end up on welfare. PTSD, untreated, can be debilitating. Salinger wrote during the war, even during combat, stories that became The Catcher in the Rye.

Can you imagine sitting down with Charlie Rose to talk about killing and death? Or with any civilian who hasn't a clue what it is like to face combat? 

Read All Quiet on the Western Front  or Slaughterhouse Five for a sample of what it is like to return home after combat. These are be the standard by which any book about infantry combat is measured. In future volumes to be published we may see how Salinger does it.

The Catcher in the Rye: A Review

Pound for pound, The Catcher in the Rye would win the American novella category and rank highly among all the novels I have read to date.

First-person narrator Holden Caulfield is America's first literary teenager, opening the door for a new genre, the teenage confessional. Like East of Eden, Ordinary People, The Outsiders and Rebel Without a Cause, The Catcher in the Rye authentically portrays the struggles of teenage boys in a certain place and time. The quality of the writing is exceptional. While first-person point of view can be a challenge for young readers, the authenticity of the narrator's voice and the book's compactness make it more accessible. A lot happens in four days trapped inside Holden's head.

The Catcher in the Rye can be seen as a young adult novel or an adult novel about the teenager within us all, a lament on the necessary loss of innocence on the way to adulthood. You can't read it as an adult without getting personality insights than were impossible as a teen because teens are by definition living within the transitional state exemplified in Holden. They can't see it as transitional because it's the only reality they know, the fog they are living within.

Caterpillar, pupa and butterfly are different states of being. The vast majority of teens are emerging from pupae-ville, just starting to sample the sights and smells of the world. For them, death--James Castle's mangled body--is an abstract notion, something in a video or book or some stage or screen rendition of Romeo and Juliet. The average teen has never been in the presence of a lifeless body and smelled death's pungent vapors--well, maybe a frog in biology class--let alone lost a beloved sibling.

Only an adult can look back on their teenage years with perspective, yet academia keeps throwing The Catcher in the Rye at teenagers because of what it says about the challenges of growing up.

The Catcher in the Rye depicts an upper-middle-class male in an urban setting going through a crisis. He's overwhelmed by the pressures of becoming an adult, but too much has been thrown at him at once. He hasn't gotten over the death of his beloved younger brother, Allie, when he witnesses the suicide of a dormitory mate, James Castle. He's been traumatized and can't function. How much can a guy take?

He's looking for answers and can't seem to get them, like Conrad Jarret in Ordinary People and Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. All three boys struggled with the death of people they cared about.

And the one person Holden respects and looks to for help, Mr. Antolini, he mistakes for a pervert, a threat. It's too much; so Holden withdraws. He wants to go live in a cabin in the woods, which is a metaphor for "Time-out! I need a break!" Phoebe rescues him with unconditional love. She accepts him no matter what. If she'd been a brat,the message would have been entirely different.

Holden goes from being antagonistic and callous to highly empathetic. He wants to protect children from the brutal realities of adulthood. But the trip has been too exhausting and he ends up in a rest home.

Cal, in East of Eden is similar to Holden--acting out, raging, doing strange things. But all four of these books/films are about males. The world of teenage girls is different; so all the guy stuff (fighting, jealousy, possessiveness, etc.) may not come across for the female reader.

I reread the book at age 67 and discovered that Holden could be suffering from PTSD stemming from the death of his brother and from witnessing the suicide of dorm-mate James Castle, who bailed out of a dorm window wearing the sweater Holden had loaned him. The symptoms Holden was exhibiting: depression, poor concentration, attention deficit, crying, uncontrollable rage, lack of motivation, self-isolation, sleeplessness, etc., are typical of PTSD.

To me The Catcher in the Rye is partially about a kid struggling against the downward spiral of mental illness. Without professional help he was doomed to submerge, and did. Holden was barely "holdin' on."

There's a lot of cultural and psychological meat in there: a) how boys interact with each other when living in close quarters, b) particularly when two have or are dating the same girl (Jane Gallagher)and one feels protective or possessive of her, c) how a sensitive boy might behave because of a deep emotional wound and d) how that boy might become neurotically protective toward his younger sister and toward children in general because of c).

Most teenagers aren't mature enough to comprehend the psychological ramifications of what I've just described unless they've been prepared for it by a mature adult who does comprehend. And there are many adults who can't.

Most adults have psychological defenses that don't allow even them to comprehend what I've just described. It's either too abstract, too complicated or too scary. I suspect this is the main reason the book is so controversial. Most people don't get it unless someone points the way.

A greater sense of Holden Caulfield through JD Salinger can be found in the film Finding Forester, which is purported to be based on Salinger's life. The reclusiveness of Forester appears rooted in the trauma of losing his beloved brother in a car crash.

In World War II, Salinger was at Utah Beach at Normandy and at bloody major campaigns like the Battle of the Bulge, where Allied troops were decimated. He was among the first Allied troops to liberate a German concentration camp. He was hospitalized for battle fatigue; he understood first-hand the effects of trauma.

In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger said that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical: "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ...it was a great relief telling people about it."

Salinger, when writing The Catcher in the Rye wouldn't have had a clue about PTSD, as it wasn't even in the diagnostic manual (DSM) for psychologists until decades later. He was just writing what he felt, blasting his feelings onto paper and letting the chips fall.

Many people see Salinger as a sort of literary genius because he sold 70 million copies of one book. I'm not saying he wasn't talented and educated; he had plenty of both going for him. I'm saying he leveraged his talent on top of some inner need to get this desperate crisis part of his life onto paper and out of his head.

A great segment of the literary world has quite understandably interpreted Holden's PTSD symptoms as mere teenage angst, but this is a gross oversimplification. It is his masterfully presented array of extreme symptoms that is largely responsible for the success of the book.

It's too complicated, or too sensitive, for English teachers to talk about mental illness; so they focus on the simple and more obvious interpretation. Such teachers are missing a phenomenal opportunity to reach kids who are in crisis or know someone who is. We'd have fewer cases of teenagers going postal if The Catcher in the Rye were used for exploring mental illness.

One point of the book is the redemptive power of unconditional love, revealed and brilliantly illustrated in the climax scene at the carousel.

Even at Phoebe's tender age, she knew how to get her point across. On the way to the carousel she digs in her heels, throws a fit, making Holden promise not to run away. Because of the depth of her devotion, Holden realizes she's doing it because she loves him, wants him to be safe and come home and return to school.

This revelation makes him so happy he begins to cry. He shows his love for Phoebe by fussing over her, making sure she gets a good seat, watching over her as the tears stream down his face in the rain. Teenage guys are supposed to be tough, but he's "practically bawling." And as if that weren't enough, Salinger practically spells it out with those two songs ("Oh Marie" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes".)

Holden wanted Sally Hayes to run away with him, but all she wanted was someone to trim the Christmas tree, skate and go to the theater with. All Jane Gallagher wanted was someone to play golf and checkers and hold hands with in a movie. The raw fierceness of Phoebe's simple, innocent devotion redeemed Holden by showing him that among all the "phoniness" and flaws of mankind there is a niche of happiness if we open our eyes hearts to the possibility.

There was no one in Holden's life--not parents, not friends, not teachers, to let Holden know he was loved--except Phoebe. She proved her love by standing her ground to keep him safe. Phoebe represents family, clan or tribe. People are social creatures, like most higher forms of the animal kingdom capable of love. Love is a bonding emotion with survival implications.

If a writer has to STATE the obvious, it ruins it for the reader, cheats the reader of that glorious "Ah-ha" moment of discovery, or worse, insults the reader's intelligence. But by not spelling it out, he/she runs the risk that some readers won't get it. Herein lies the artistry--the use of symbol (ducks, fish), metaphor (pond), mood setting (rain).

Salinger strikes a balance between showing and telling, with the knowledge that some readers will get it and others will walk away shaking their heads, or come up with interpretations that he had not intended. We tend to find what we are capable of seeing, or need to.

Nature symbols are used sparingly but effectively. Ducks flying south and the "part frozen, and part not frozen" pond can symbolize Holden's transitional state--neither boy nor man. The fish symbolize nature, a reminder that a natural process ("Mother Nature") is taking place. The seasons come and go; we live; we die; we get sick; we get well; we get hurt; we heal. Are the Central Park ducks there to remind us that to survive and thrive we must stick together? You decide.

A final word on the so-called "Peter Pan" interpretation of Holden. I find little support in the text for the position that Holden was resisting growing up.

The passage often cited as evidence for the Peter Pan perception concerns the naked-breasted squaw diorama at the museum. Holden: The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. . . . You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, . . . and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

In an article in the October 14, 2014, The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, author Mendelshon says, "The all-too-evident regret in that last sentence is striking — one of the novel’s many markers of Holden’s problem, which is a refusal to grow up." What regret? There is nothing in the text that conveys regret. Mendelshon may be projecting from his own history or it could be academic influence, some popular professor's interpretation that caught on because it was easy to relate to.

Practically everyone, Youtube star John Green included, parses out this naked-breasted squaw passage and Holden's liberal use of the word "phony" as evidence Holden doesn't want to grow up, while overlooking a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Holden smokes, drinks, lies about his age, critiques theater and music performances, frequents museums, hires a prostitute, repeatedly seeks out adult conversation with peer-level engagement, acts protectively toward children. How many examples are needed to prove Holden is experimenting with adulthood? Criticizing adults as phony means he's evaluating adult behavior, not resisting. This is engagement, not avoidance.

Note further that Holden never seeks advice from his parents, or even thinks about it. Not consulting parents shows independence of mind, the embrace of maturity, not dependency or disengagement from the responsibilities of adulthood. Holden expresses compassionate concern about his mother, indicating that she hasn't been the same since Allie died. Compassion toward a grieving parent is adult thinking.

It shouldn't escape notice that Holden was also eagerly embracing the dessert of adulthood--sex, smoking, booze, nightclub music, dancing, flirting, dating, literature and the dramatic arts--while agonizing over the spinach of social hypocrisy and rationalization.

So, how DO we interpret Holden's comment about the bare-breasted Native American?

The key is in that last sentence, underlined above: "The only thing that would be different would be you." Holden is telling us he is aware that he is changing. This level of intuitive self-reflection is adult thinking. It also shows maturity to appreciate that "some things don't change and never should," because they are part of our cultural identity.

Nostalgic awareness is mature thinking. Mature people want to protect and preserve cultural icons.

Think of the loss and disorientation after the Twin Towers were destroyed. Icons like the Statue of Liberty are signposts reminding us of who and where we are. Holden was feeling lost. In his agitated state he desperately needed that bare-breasted squaw to be right where she had always been. That's all he was getting at with his comment. You Peter Pan theorists, give the kid a break and stop projecting your own history onto him.

Holden pondered and wrote down the Wilhelm Stekel quote Mr. Antollini gave him: "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." This is another sign he was putting a lot of serious and strenuous thought into growing up.

There are teenagers and even some adults, who resist growing up because their parents don't want to let go. They've been infantalized, encouraging dependency. Holden shows no evidence of having been infantalized. Quite the contrary, sending a kid to a military-style prep school could be evidence that Holden was too independent and possibly hard to control.

Many readers are perplexed by the book, for it is way over the heads of many, even some who teach literature. The book must be read slowly and thoughtfully in order to absorb its meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye even gets into the very meaning of life in the Steckel quote cited by Antolini: "The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." You can shrug your shoulders and flip the page or you can sit and ponder what it means, which could take days.

Many readers, teens in particular, resist The Catcher in the Rye because of the book's capacity to trigger self-reflection. It resonates with their own transition from juvenile to adult, a vital period for personality development, when boys and girls become men and women and are confronted with one another's sexuality and the struggle to think and "be" independent from their parents.

Check out the date rape scene in Ed Bankey's car when Holden overhears Stradlater abusing a girl in the back seat. You can't just blast through that scene without stopping to ponder your own early dating experiences.

The evidence on the page shows that Holden was not resisting adulthood; he was aggressively embracing it. Holden was no Peter Pan.

The book is a masterpiece of art and insight. Who will ever get into the head of a teenage boy so deeply, so thoroughly and with such an authentic and authoritative voice?


(More about me at http://www.wattpad.com/user/MHeying/works/page/1)

The Catcher in the Rye: Phoebe, Ducks and Nature

When he needed it most, there was no one in Holden's life--not parents nor friends nor teachers--to let him know he was valued and loved. His veneer of rude independence was like a barking dog, keeping people at bay. Buy his little sister Phoebe proved her devotion by standing her ground to keep her brother safe. She had already lost one brother, Allie, to cancer, and wasn't about to let it happen again.

Phoebe represents not only innocence but family, clan or tribe, as do the Central Park ducks that Holden keeps mentioning. People are social creatures. Love is a powerful bonding emotion with profound survival implications for most higher forms of life. If you want to test the concept, just wander between a gorilla and her cubs in spring.

If a writer has to state the obvious it cheats the reader of that glorious "Ah-ha" moment of discovery, or worse,  insult the reader's intelligence. But by not spelling it out the author runs the risk that some readers won't get it. Herein lies some of the artistry in writing--the use of symbol (ducks, fish), metaphor (pond), mood and setting (rain).

In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger strikes a balance between showing and telling, with full knowledge that some readers will walk away shaking their heads or come up with interpretations that he had not imagined. We tend to find what we are capable of seeing, or need to see.

Nature symbols are used effectively in this, Salinger's first novel. Ducks flying south and the "part frozen, and part not frozen" pond remind us of Holden's uncomfortable sate of transition. He is an adolescent, neither boy nor man. The fish are suggestive of nature, reminding that a natural process ("Mother Nature") is taking place. The seasons come and go. We get sick; we get well; we get hurt; we heal; we live; we die. Are the Central Park ducks in the story to remind us that to survive and thrive we need to stick together? Possibly.

Three times, Holden frets over the Central Park ducks, reflecting Salinger's study of Buddhism, a belief known for empathy. Such hypersensitivity would be expected of Salinger given his years of trauma in military combat.

When one has witnessed extreme suffering over three years--men chopped and blown to pieces, skeletal remains, walking dead and emaciated corpses in a concentration camp (Dachau)--life in all its forms can take on an expanded level of meaning.

What was Salinger's intent by making Holden worry about the welfare of ducks? It could show a wacky, childish aspect of Holden's character, or that he is mentally unbalanced or that he has the makings of a deeply spiritual, compassionate person. Or some combination of all three.

Here are four citations about the ducks:

On page 13, Holden is in a conversation with Mr. Spencer and daydreams about the ducks. "The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull. I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go. I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck an took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away."

On page 60 Holden asks the first cabby about the ducks."...listen, I said. "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?"
He turned around and looked at me like I was a madman.
"Whatt're ya tryna do, bud?" he said. "Kid me?"
"No--I was just interested, that's all."
He didn't say anything more, so I didn't either.

On page 81 Holden brings up the ducks again with the second cabby: "Hey, Horwitz," I said. "You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central Park South?"
"The what?"
"The lagoon. That little lake, like, there where the ducks are. You know."
"Yeah, what about it?"
"Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the spring time and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?"
"Where who goes?"
"The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away, or to they fly away by themselves--go south or something?"
Old Horwitz turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn't a bad guy, though.
"How the hell should I know about a stupid thing like that?"

The conversation goes on for two pages bout the Central Park ducks and fish, then Horwitz ends it with: "Listen," he said. "If you was a fish, Mother Nature'd take care of you, wouldn't she? Right? You don't think them fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?"
"No, but --"
"You're goddam right they don't," Horwitz said, and drove off like a bat out of hell.

The duck musings and dialog depict Holden, the cab drivers and city people in general as somewhat ignorant of nature, but if satire of urban life were on the agenda it would show up elsewhere. Like the theme of compassion, which crops up in every chapter--Holden fights Stradlater because of his probable abuse of Jane Galagher; he lies to a classmate's mother to make her feel good about her creep of a son; he chats with nuns, gives them money and tries to pay their bill; he lies to tourists about Gary Cooper to give them a story to tell when they return home; he hires a prostitute but he pays her to just talk to him instead of doing anything sexual because she's too young; he removes graffiti so kids won't see it; he wants to make a career of protecting kids from "going over a cliff"; he's even nostalgic over a nature diorama at the museum. Holden is such a softie that even reading about someone getting killed bothers him: The thing is, it drives me crazy if somebody gets killed--especially somebody very smart and entertaining and all--and it's somebody else's fault. Holden eventually feels sympathetic toward Stradlater, who knocked him flat, and even toward Maurice, the elevator operator/pimp who punched him.

Holden's concern over the ducks supports the themes of innocence and compassion and the security, warmth and social connection of family, making Phoebe's prominent climactic role in the story seem entirely natural.

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Notable Salinger Quotes

The Catcher in the Rye:

Holden Caulfield...

 “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
“Anyway, 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 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 am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.”

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”

“It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”

“When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”

“And I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I'd probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”



Mr. Antolini...
“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

“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.”

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”

“I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”

“People are always ruining things for you.”

 “when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.”

“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.”

“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.”

“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”

“If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?”

“People never notice anything.”

“People always clap for the wrong reasons.”

 “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they're pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody's be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.”



Franny and Zooey:
“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”

“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”

“And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.”

“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”



Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”

The Significance of the Bare-breasted Squaw

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/do-we-read-differently-at-different-ages.html?_r=0

In the above-referenced October 14, 2014, article in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, the article's author Daniel Mendelshon asserts that Holden is resisting adulthood, citing as evidence Holden's comment about a diorama exhibit with a bare-breasted squaw. Holden: “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. . . . You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, . . . and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”

Mendelshon says, "The all-too-evident regret in that last sentence is striking — one of the novel’s many markers of Holden’s problem, which is a refusal to grow up."

The above illustrates a common interpretation of Holden that I find hard to support in the actual text. Practically everyone, Youtube star John Green included, parses out this passage about "that squaw with the naked bosom" and Holden's liberal use of the word "phony" as concrete evidence Holden doesn't want to grow up, while overlooking a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Holden smokes, drinks, lies about his age, critiques theater performances, frequents museums, hires a prostitute, repeatedly seeks out adult conversation with peer-level engagement, acts protectively toward children. How many examples are needed to prove Holden is experimenting with adulthood? Criticizing adults as phony means he's evaluating adult behavior, not resisting. This is engagement, not avoidance.

It shouldn't escape notice that Holden was eagerly embracing the candy of adulthood--sex, smoking, booze, nightclub music, dancing, flirting, dating, critiquing literature and the dramatic arts--while agonizing over the spinach of social hypocrisy and rationalization.

So, how DO we interpret Holden's comment about the bare-breasted Native American?

The key is in that last sentence, underlined above: "The only thing that would be different would be you." Holden is telling us he is aware that he is changing. This level of intuitive self-reflection is adult thinking. It also shows maturity to appreciate that some things don't change and never should, because they are part of our cultural identity.

Nostalgic awareness is mature thinking. Mature people want to protect and preserve cultural icons.

Think of the loss and disorientation after the Twin Towers were destroyed. Icons like the Statue of Liberty are signposts reminding us of who and where we are. Holden was feeling lost. In his agitated state he desperately needed that bare-breasted squaw to be right where she had always been. That's all he was getting at with his comment. Give the kid a break.

Holden pondered and wrote down the Wilhelm Stekel quote Mr. Antollini gave him: "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." This is another sign he was putting a lot of serious thought into growing up.

To wax psychological, there are teenagers and even some adults, who resist growing up because their parents don't want to let go. They've been infantalized, encouraging dependency. Holden shows no evidence of having been infantalized. Quite the contrary, ending a kid to a military-style prep school could be evidence that Holden was too independent and possibly hard to control.

The evidence on the page shows that Holden was not resisting adulthood, he was aggressively embracing it.

#   #   #

Batman, PTSD and Holden Caulfield

7/16/2012:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2012/07/15/156779114/the-id-the-ego-and-the-superhero-what-makes-batman-tick#

Bruce and Holden both suffer obvious symptoms of PTST. Forgetting for the moment that both are fictional characters, what  should be glaringly obvious to a mental health professional such as Robin Rosenberg (see above link), author of What's the Matter With Batman?, is that the childhood trauma Bruce Wayne suffered witnessing his parents' murders, resulted in adult rage, directed in his case against criminals. I disagree with Rosenberg's conclusion: "Rosenberg argues that there's nothing really worng with Batman--or, rather, with the man inside the suit. Her verdict? 'Bruce Wayne is a really clever man who has both high intelligence and high EQ, emotional quotient.'"

What do shrinks know, anyway?

Holden Caulfield had the makings of a future Batman for a similar reason--he witnessed the death of both is brother, Aliee, and a schoolmate, James Castle, who committed suicide wearing the sweater Holden loaned him. Holden's neurotic reaction to these traumatic deathes was a compelling urge to protect innocent children from harm, expressed in his fantasy of catching them before they could fall over a cliff. The book ends before we can find out what kind of an adult he turns into, but the urge to protect is well established in his fantasy.

What Rosenberg fails to confront is the basic and well proven fact that many of our leaders and superstars are merely overcompensating for some childhood deprivation or trauma. Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier in World War II, dropped out of school in the fifth grade to support the family after his father abandoned them. After James Dean's mother died, his father left him for is grandparents to raise and had little to do with him. Tolstoy and William Saroyan were orphans. Hitler, Sadam Husein and Stalin were beaten as children. Ted Turner's been overcompensating for bipolar disorder all his life. The list goes on. Bruce Wayne and Holden are no different from these examples.

What Rosenberg left unanswered is why for some people a rough childhood leads to a life of crime while others use it as a springboard for success. Answer that one and you've got something to write about.

Rosenberg almost gets there, but not quite: "'In essence,' Rosenberg says, 'superheroes are gifted people, so we can probably figure out a lot about them based on what we know from the science of giftedness.'

Perhaps the problem, she suggests, "doesn't lie in the gifted Bruce Wayne, but in the people who assume something has to be wrong with him in the first place. Perhaps we're just not accustomed to his kind of self-sacrifice. 'People who are truly selfless,' she says, 'who have given so much of themselves, are confusing to most of us. And I think some of us, in cynical moments, say, 'There must be something the matter with someone who would do that.'"

I don't think it's that complicated. I think superstars are just overcompensating.



7/20/12: Oddly enough, there's an example in the news just this morning about a shooting by a disturbed you young man, James Holmes, in Colorado at a screening of Batman.

Perhaps if English teachers taught CATCHER from a mental health angle, there would be fewer instances of this:

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/20/12850048-mass-chaos-as-12-s...

Teaching The Catcher in the Rye

My condolences to the families, friends and acquaintances of children lost in the Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and other school shootings.

Do people think of Holden Caulfield when there's a school shooting? My mind automatically goes to that final scene, with Phoebe going round and round on the carousel and Holden "damn near bawling."

Each one of those kids killed in Connecticut was a delicate, vulnerable human being. As were the adults. In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger was saying that we should be aware and protective not just of children but of all mankind. He finished the book after returning from war: Utah Beach at Normandy, The Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of a concentration camp and working in military intelligence, where he interrogated battle-scarred and wounded enemy soldiers. He'd been hospitalized from "battle fatigue," militaryspeak of the period for a nervous collapse.batman Bruce Wayne childhood trauma holden caulfied ptsd Robin Rosenberg superhero The Catcher in the Rye

Every year, a few teachers and students grumble that The Catcher in the Rye is outdated and irrelevant, but for most the book will remain forever a warning that we need to be vigilant not just our children from school shootings, but all of mankind, from danger of every source. We need to look out for each other. We're in this together.

We would have fewer cases of teenagers going postal if CATCHER were used to teach about mental illness. Like John Voss in EMPIRE FALLS, and John Bender in the cult film, BREAKFAST CLUB, Holden Caulfield  shines a golden light on the teenager in crisis.

Try and view CATCHER as less about teenage coming-of-age angst and more about a kid struggling against the downward spiral of a mental breakdown. Without professional help Holden was doomed to submerge and did, ending up in a "rest home."

Holden was barely "holdin' on."

Teenage angst is a gross oversimplification of Holden Caufield's erratic behavior. It us Salinger's masterfully rendered array of extreme symptoms that is largely responsible for the success of the book. But it's too complicated or too sensitive for most English teachers to talk about mental illness; so they focus on the simple and obvious.


As an undergraduate in the '60s I could barely get through CATCHER. I didn't care about some crude spoiled preppy kid who couldn't get his act together. In a word, I was clueless. Unguided, a lot of people will react to the book in this way. That's what a teacher is for, to shine a little light now and then.

Holden is a fictional character, but the book is autobiographical, and a careful reading provides valuable insight into the human condition because of it.

Clues into the psyche of J.D. Salinger can be found in the film FINDING FORESTER, whose reclusive main character, played by Sean Connery, is based on Salinger. In a 1953 interview with a high-school newspaper, Salinger said that the novel was "sort of" autobiographical: "My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ...it was a great relief telling people about it."

In rereading the book last fall it appeared to me that Holden was suffering from PTSD stemming from the death of his brother and from witnessing the suicide of a schoolmate who bailed out of a dorm window wearing the sweater Holden had loaned him. I researched and listed the symptoms: depression, poor concentration, attention deficit, crying, uncontrollable rage, lack of motivation, self-isolation, sleeplessness, etc.

(I'm intimately familiar with these symptoms because my own PTSD diagnosis stemming from childhood trauma.I get Holden's struggle. I live with that same feeling that I need to save kids from danger. I had to watch boys get horrific beatings in the orphanage where I spent the last nine years of my childhood. It's this compulsion to protect children that drives my own writing.)

Salinger, when writing CATCHER wouldn't have had a clue about PTSD, as it wasn't even in the diagnostic manual (DSM) for psychologists until decades later. He was just writing what he felt, blasting his feelings onto paper and letting the chips fall.

Still, the story is pretty advanced for the average reader under twenty years of age. In high school, a teacher would need to do a good bit of student preparation. There's too much going on with too little background. For example, the book is sparse in setting description. Someone who hasn't experienced an urban living environment or hasn't lived in a dormitory will have trouble visualizing most of the scenes.

By addressing the mental health aspects of The Catcher in the Rye, teachers have a phenomenal opportunity to reach kids who are in crisis or who know of someone who is.

Mr. Spencer, Holden's Crumby Teacher

We've all had them--the teacher whose class you hated to attend: who talks without saying anything or plays favorites or humiliates or any number of abuses of this exalted role in front of the class.

In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger burns Mr. Spencer into our memory with one of my favorite quotes. Holden's been summoned by Spencer, his history teacher, to his apartment after Spencer learned Holden was being expelled for poor academic performance. Spencer reads to Holden from one of his exams.:

"Dear Mr. Spencer. That is all I know about the Egyptians. I can’t seem to get very interested in them although your lectures are very interesting. It is all right with me if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything else except English anyway. Respectfully yours, Holden Caulfield."

   He put my goddam paper down then and looked at me like he’d just beaten hell out of me in ping-pong or something. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him for reading me that crap out loud. I wouldn’t’ve read it out loud to him if he’d written it—I really wouldn’t. In the first place, I’d only written that damn note so that he wouldn’t feel too bad about flunking me.

  “Do you blame me for flunking you, boy?” he said.

  “No, sir! I certainly don’t,’  I said. I wished to hell he’d stop calling me “boy” all the time. 

...

  "What would you have done in my place?" he said. "Tell the truth, boy."

   Well, you could see he really felt pretty lousy about flunking me. So I shot the bull for a while. I told him I was a real moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would've done exactly the same thing if I'd been in his place, and how most people didn't appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull.

   The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull. I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park Slouth. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go. I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondererd if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.

Holden has zoned out. Spencer is clueless about the boy's predicament, the crises he's going through. And all the teacher can think about is covering his ass and soothing his guilt at Holden's expense. He's kicking the boy while he's down instead of trying to understand. Some would call it tough love. I call it stupidity and incompetence.

Maynard vs Salinger: Another Side to the Story

The recent PBS documentary seems to criticize J.D. Salinger for preferring the company of young women. 

These women were of age or were chaperoned, and eagerly sought his companionship. In the documentary Joyce Maynard expressed that she felt she was exploited by Salinger. Her mother even encouraged the relationship, sewing her a "sexy short dress" (her words) to wear to their first meeting. Maynard wrote a kiss-and-tell betrayal memoir and auctioned Salinger's love letters. The evidence suggests she was a highly ambitious, if not vindictive, young writer who expected to profit from a relationship with a well-known older writer. Maynard continues to benefit from her former relationship with Salinger by granting interviews on the topic to promote her writing. You can't Google "Salinger" without her name scrolling to page one.

Maynard portrayed Salinger as a despicable man who preyed on young girls. Her allegations played on public sympathies and cast a shadow over a highly respected writer's reputation. Salinger's silence can be seen not as gentlemanly conduct but a sign of guilt. The shadow has grown over the years as Maynard's repeated version of their relationship went unrebutted by Salinger himself, though not unchallenged by a few third parties. There is always more than one side to a story.

Just as there can be despicable men, there can also be misguided young women who prey on insecure older men and play the victim to avoid scrutiny. Such crimes don't leave many tracks, so the evidence is often circumstantial. You have to do some digging and connect the dots. (More on this below.)

History has shown that the title of Victim doesn't wear well with young women like Monica Lewinsky and Joyce Maynard who of their own volition court relationships with famous older men and cry "foul" when things don't go their way. Joyce received many letters from admiring male fans when her face appeared on that magazine cover; yet it was Salinger she chose to pursue. Who exploited whom?

That Maynard and Lewinsky may have been swept away starry-eyed or encouraged by their mothers may help explain, but not excuse, their behavior. They were past the age of consent and no one twisted their arms.People who at eighteen years of age are adult enough to fight in wars, purchase alcohol and vote, should be  adult  enough to take the consequences of poor relationship choices  without the "poor me" pose.

An eighteen-year-old boy in similar circumstances with a fifty-five year-old Cher Bono would be laughed out of town if he complained, and girls mature more rapidly than boys. Why is Maynard begging for and getting so much sympathy? Welder's goggles are needed against the glare of that double standard. Another glaring example is The Summer of 42, a '70s feature film and novella about a fifteen-year-old boy seduced by a beautiful young war widow played by Jennifer O'Neill. The novel was a best-seller and the film a "blockbuster" success. Harold and Maude is another highly popular mid-'70s film with an older woman opposite a teenage boy. The lack of outrage toward older women having sex with underage boys reflects a societal bias toward young women that Maynard is exploiting.

She talks about an imbalance of power, pointing to their chronological (emotional maturity is addressed below) age difference. Nothing prevented her or her mother from doing that arithmetic when she was eighteen. Maynard put on her sexy dress and made a beeline for Salinger's bed having weighed their age difference against some potential gain from a relationship with a handsome, successful, famous man.

Over the strident objections of her father, eighteen-year-old Oona O'Neill--Salinger's earlier love--married millionaire moviemaker Charlie Chaplin, a man thirty-six years her senior. Despite the odds, it was a marriage that worked. The risks paid off on both sides. Where is the outrage over that imbalanced union?

Maynard wants us to believe that she wrote her tell-all and auctioned Salinger's love letters to pay for her kid's college, and revenge had nothing to do with it. She didn't keep a sex-stained dress; she kept the intimate feelings he poured onto paper on her behalf, let them age like a fine merlot, then sold them to the highest bidder. Whatever you choose to believe, she cashed in on a bet she made when she was eighteen. Some people will respect her for that. Others will not.

Maynard said Salinger summarily dismissed her because she wanted children and he did not. Other sources say she had given out his phone number to agents and editors while marketing her work. Later--as did Martha Gellhorn and James Michener--Maynard adopted children and then handed them off to someone else to raise. There are elements here of half-truth, impulsiveness and ambition. Self-promotion is a messy process and can be embarrassingly self-revealing.

Despite his privileged origins, J.D. Salinger earned his respect the hard way, with talent and hard work and by risking his life with honorable military combat in some of the most difficult battles Americans ever fought. He sidestepped a wartime draft deferment to get into the Army and courageously volunteered to return and hunt Nazis after recovering from a nervous collapse. The blood, sweat and terror of his honorable service surges through his writing like steroids. I wonder if Maynard considered Salinger's record versus hers when she wrote her tell-all.

If anyone in this paring is due sympathy it is Jerry Salinger. Emotional maturity matters in a relationship, and there is ample evidence that he was fragile. He was socially withdrawn. He was born with one testicle, a deformity that made him extremely self-conscious and insecure in intimate settings. An inexperienced woman would be less likely to discover his freakishness and ruin the moment by laughing, or screaming. Salinger spent months in a mental ward recovering from battle fatigue. Could Maynard have sensed his fragility and sought to exploit it? She certainly knew there was no risk of him going public with his embarrassing deformity to defend his predilection toward young women.

On the other hand, where was Maynard on the scale of emotional maturity? She could have been emotionally much younger than her chronological age. Was it then a case of child-on-child mutual exploitation? It's an unanswerable question that must be considered and demands that we not judge too harshly either party.

Some men have a certain gullibility with women. Was not Salinger's demonstrated when Oona married Chaplin without so much as phone call or a "Dear John" letter to the man in uniform she had professed to love? And again later, when Salinger was a Nazi hunter in Army Intelligence and was fooled into marrying a Nazi? Insecure and devious women are drawn to powerful men they sense to be vulnerable, a profile Salinger fits.

Maybe the clincher in this lopsided romantic mystery lies between the covers of The Catcher in the Rye. Maynard wants us to see Salinger as Stradlater, Holden's sexually aggressive roommate. But as we all know, Holden, heroically fought Stradlater to protect Jane. "What a technique that guy [Stradlater] had. ...I damn near puked listening to him. His date kept saying, 'No--please. Please, don't. Please.' But old Stradlater kept snowing her in his Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice, and finally there'd be this silence in the back of the car." Does Holden, J.D.'s doppelganger, sound like a predator or a protector? There are a dozen similar instances in which Salinger, through Holden, displays a fundamentally compassionate nature incongruent with someone prone toward child exploitation.

Maynard, by contrast, has clearly demonstrated exploitation--by giving out Salinger's telephone number, by writing a tell-all memoir and auctioning love letters, by granting interviews and writing articles about their relationship to gain publicity and by playing on public sympathies toward young women to justify her exploitation of a socially withdrawn aging writer. However she tries to camouflage it, Maynard's behavior is like something from the pages of Seventeen, a magazine that to this day features revenge as a tonic for the fragile egos of jilted teenage girls.

Maynard accuses Salinger of being "seductive with words and ideas" yet her own words betray her own intent to manipulate and play to readers' sympathies. In her New York Times Sunday Magazine article, September, 2013, "Was Salinger Too Pure for This World?" she writes:  "...how can a woman say she is fully in charge of her body and her destiny, and then call herself a victim when, having given a man her heart of her own volition, he crushes it?" [emphasis added] So, if a girl ends a relationship she's just moving on, but if a guy does it it's "crushing" a "poor girl's heart." Maynard's gender bias and pandering for sympathy ripples throughout her article.  She accuses, interprets and judges, lulling the unwary reader into nodding in agreement.

Compare Joyce Maynard with the tragic case of Natalie Wood, a true example of childhood exploitation. At age sixteen while filming Rebel Without a Cause, she carried on  concurrent affairs with fellow actor Dennis Hopper and the film's director, Nicholas Ray. Hopper and Ray should have been dragged before a judge and Natalie's parents cited for neglect. Her  tortured life and tragic death can be attributed to childhood exploitation, but for Maynard to cast J.D. Salinger in a similar category with Hopper and Ray is unjust and vicious.

Maynard may have been too emotionally immature at age eighteen to have a relationship with Salinger or anyone else, and maybe it took a few months for him to figure that out. But Salinger should not be scapegoated for the inadequacies of her parents.

J.D. Salinger is gone. We will never know his side of it, but I am inclined to be wary of someone who would publicly disparage a former lover she knew could not or would not stand up for himself, and then, with all the sympathy of a pit viper for a field mouse, auction his love letters without a word of apology. At a minimum, we know there is a lot more to the story than Maynard let on.  And the more she tries to justify her actions, the worse she looks.

Women don't make themselves strong by playing victim. The young Joyce Maynard rolled the relationship dice and came up snake-eyes. We've all done that, and most of us move on and lick our wounds in silence. Choices have consequences.

Victim or viper, Maynard will go down in history as a whiner unless she writes something truly worthy of notice. She has a lot going for her; I hope she does. It takes courage to admit mistakes. What it comes down to is whether she wants to be known as a writer or as a girl dumped by a famous writer a half-century ago.

#   #   #

Codependent Holden Caulfield

A classic codependent is someone so emotionally entwined with an addict that she cannot extract herself from the chaos of his drug-induced lifestyle. His addictive erratic behavior harms not only himself, but her and others indirectly. Another type of codependent is someone whose life spins out of control because they are drawn irresistibly to the neediness of others, as seems to be the case with The Catcher in the Rye 's Holden Caulfield.

A close reading reveals ten instances in which Holden goes out on a limb for someone. The first is when he takes a swing at his prep school roommate, Stradlater, because he sees him as a sexual predator to Jane Gallagher, a vulnerable girl whom he knows well. Here are Holden's thoughts after he has been knocked flat and had his nose bloodied by the large and stronger athlete: "I just kept laying there on Ely's bed, thinking about Jane and all. It just drove me stark staring mad when I thought about her and Stradlater parked somewhere in that fat-assed Ed Banky's car. Every time I thought about it, I felt like jumping out the window. The thing is, you didn't know Stradlater. I knew him. Most guys at Pency just talked about having sexual intercourse with girls all the time--like Ackley, for instance-- but old Stradlater really did it. I was personally acquainted with at least two girls he gave the time to. That's the truth. ... I kept laying there in the dark anyway, though, trying not to think about old Jane and Stradlater in that goddam Ed Banky's car. But it was almost impossible. The trouble was, I knew that guy Stradlater's technique. ...I damn near puked listening to him. His date kept saying, 'No--please. Please, don't. Please.' But old Stradlater kept snowing her in his Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice, and finally there'd be this silence in the back of the car." 

In the next instance, Holden lies consolingly to Mr. Spencer so this aging History teacher will not feel bad about flunking him: "I told him I was a real Moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would have done exactly the same thing if I'd been in his place, and how most people didn't appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull. ...'Look, sir. Don't worry about me,' I said. 'I mean it. I'll be all right. I'm just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they?'
'I don't know boy. I don't know.'
I hate it when somebody answers that way. 'Sure. Sure, they do,' I said. 'I mean it, sir. Please don't worry about me.'"

Next, on a night train to the City Holden runs into to classmate Ernest Morrow's mother and concocts an elaborate lie about Ernest's friends wanting him to run for Class President. Holden's intent is to make her feel better about her horse's ass of a son: "'Ernest's father and I sometimes worry about him," she said. ..."He's a very sensitive boy. He's never really been a terribly good mixer with other boys. ...'
Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat.
I gave her a good look. She didn't look like any dope to me. She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what a bastard  she was the mother of. ...Mothers are all slightly insane. The thing is though, I liked old Morrow's mother. She was all right.
...'Old Ernie,' I said. 'He's one of the most popular boys at Pency. Did you know that?'
'No, I didn't.'
...I had her glued to her seat. You take somebody's mother, all they want to hear about is what a hot-shot their son is.
...'Did he tell you about the elections?" I asked her. 'The class elections?'
She shook her head. I had her in a trance , like. I really did.
'Well, a bunch of us wanted Ernie to be president of the class. I mean, he was the unanimous choice.'"

Holden next tells about playing checkers with Jane Gallagher when she became upset over a confrontation with her stepfather, and Holden overreacted. He describes his actions as almost involuntary: "Then all of a sudden, this tear plopped down on the checkerboard. On one of the red squares--boy, I can still see it. She just rubbed it into the board with her finger. I don't know why, but it bothered hell out of me. So what I did was, I went over and made her move over on the glider so that I could sit down next to her--I practically sat down in her lap, as a matter of fact. Then she really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over--anywhere--her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows and all, her ears--her whole face except her mouth and all. She sort of wouldn't let me get to her mouth. Anyway, it was the closest we ever got to necking."

In a nightclub later Holden tells a group of tourist women from Seattle that they just missed Gary Cooper. It's a lie he tells so they will have something interesting to report back home. Holden even worries about the welfare of animals, repeatedly expressing concern over how the ducks in Central Park get by during winter. Holden offers some nuns an over-sized donation, which they gracefully turn down. He even changes his mind about having sex with the prostitute, Sunny, whom he sees as too young. They talk instead, even though she had taken off her dress.

The ninth example of Holden's codependent drive to help and protect others is when he confesses to his younger sister Phoebe what he wants to do with his life--to be a "Catcher in the Rye" and protect children from going over an imaginary cliff. Near the end of the book, Holden sits in the rain in his red "people-hunting" cap while he watches Phoebe ride the carousel. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is playing in the background. The depth of his emotion shows how strongly he feels about seeing her safe and happy: "My hunting hat gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked, anyway. I didn't care though. I felt so happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn  happy, if you want to know the truth. ...It was just that she looked so nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all."

It could be said that Holden is just a caring, kind person and these are all just examples of his compassionate nature. But if that were so, it wouldn't have put him in a mental hospital.

On the contrary, a case can be made that Holden became  hypersensitized by the death from leukemia of his little brother, Ailee. The suicide of Holden's classmate James Castle deepened that sensitivity. Holden's unresolved grief sabotages his life, rendering him unable to function normally. He is highly intelligent, but he can't concentrate and repeatedly flunks out  or drops out of school. Everywhere he turns he sees something wrong, making him anxious, confused, lonely. He cries and has feelings of bleeding from the gut. To make sense of his chaotic state of mind, he overreacts to everyday events, like meeting Earnest Morrow's mother on the train and concocting that elaborate lie.

Unresolved grief can be complicated and debilitating as we obsess over our relationship with the loved one who  died. Guilt can arise over something we said or did or failed to apologize for to someone whose dearness we may never have acknowledged.

When we are emotionally intimate with someone over a period of years the shared experiences and feelings become a part of our identity, anchoring us in the swirl of life. The sudden loss of these identity reference points can shake us to our knees, and it can take a long time to recover--years. Codependency can be a coping mechanism whereby we mimic with strangers a ritual cascade of apologies for our imagined inadequacies toward the person we lost. On the outside we seem normal, but inside our skin we writhe in pain from an invisible unnamed source.

Compassion may be the highest human value, but some people get hooked on it like a drug. Codependency is the clinician's label for being too human, so attuned to others' pain that we spin out of orbit as our own needs go unattended.

The measure of Holden's emotional investment in Ailee and James Castle is the level of chaos in his life that surfaced in the wake of their passing. Like a junkie, Holden craved the good feelings that came when he did something that relieved or prevented suffering. It gave him a sense of control over his chaotic life and made his bad feelings go away for a while. But it was never enough. And we are left wondering whether Holden will spend the rest of his life playing God and trying to fix the world instead of taking care of himself.

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Narcissist or Codependent? Diagnose Yourself With Holden Caulfield

Do you like Holden? Or do you think he's an idiot? And what does that say about you?

Framing The Catcher in the Rye through a psychologist's lens may help in understanding your reaction to this controversial classic and shed light on your personality.

Holden imagines himself in a field of rye where children are playing and feels an urge to protect them from falling over a cliff. Entertain for the moment that the field of rye represents Holden's feelings of codependency, an excessive preoccupation with the needs of others, as in the urge to protect the innocent and vulnerable.

Foreshadowed by his repeatedly expressed concern for the ducks in Central Park, Holden announces to Phoebe that he wants to be a "catcher in the rye." Similar behavior reappears in the final scene when he's in tears, sitting in the rain in his red "people hunting hat" watching Phoebe ride the carousel with "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" playing in the background.

A narcissist could care less about protecting others, vulnerable or otherwise. Narcissists are incapable of empathy. A character like Holden would seem ridiculous, even repellent. The narcissist might feel more attracted to characters like Ayn Rand's John Gault.

I read somewhere that ninety-six percent of the world's population have codependent tendencies. This could help explain the vast popularity of the book while a few readers are repelled.

(Lest I get torched for accusing people of being codependent or narcissistic, lets be clear that this is a mental exercise intended only to deepen understanding of a book. Only you, or your therapist, know your behavioral tendencies.)

The Effect of Salinger's Combat Experience on His Writing

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield's unrealistic concern for "little kids" resonates with the classic layman's definition of a codependent personality--someone whose life is spinning out of control out of concern for someone with a substance abuse problem.* Holden's codependency is addressed in a separate posting, but it is worth noting here that Holden, as a doppelganger for Salinger, can reflect the author's emotional state. Codependency, the compulsion to rescue others, can be the result of having seen so many men shot, killed, wounded and maimed and the Dachau concentration camp's emaciated bodies among the smell of burning flesh.

Salinger's war experience may account for the rambling structure and overall content of The Catcher in the Rye, as the book was worked on during endless months of combat overseas. Thoughts and memories of home gave the mind relief from the blood, chaos and gore and had a lot to do with Salinger's exquisite loving attention to these details of setting and character. I suspect it kept him from going mad sooner than he did.

He was once seen typing away under a desk while his unit was under fire. Everyone else had taken cover.

It has been widely expressed that Salinger was suffering from PTSD caused by combat trauma. It is logical that an extreme need to protect the innocent could arise from witnessing over a period of years the massive destruction of humanity. Holden could represent an expression of this distorted hyper-sensitivity for the welfare of the innocent. Holden could have been a healthy way to channel and defuse overwhelming emotions, expressing a self-destructive compulsion by creating a character to act out and resolve it.

*[Wikipedia]"Codependency is defined as a psychological condition or a relationship in which a person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected with a pathological condition (typically narcissism or drug addiction); and in broader terms, it refers to the dependence on the needs of, or control of, another.[1] It also often involves placing a lower priority on one's own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.[2] Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family, work, friendship, and also romantic, peer or community relationships.[2] Codependency may also be characterized by denial, low self-esteem, excessive compliance, or control patterns.[2] Narcissists are considered to be natural magnets for the codependent."I also STRONGLY suspect that a major factor in the rambling structure and overall content of CiTR is that it was largely written while overseas during wartime. This had a lot to do with Salinger's exquisite loving attention to the details of setting and character. That he cherished his memories of home is clearly evident in the richness of this content.

For the Kid Who Doesn't Get The Catcher in the Rye

[Spoiler at paragraph 12]

Some readers of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have expressed frustration with the book, complaining that it has no plot or they have trouble relating to the spoiled, whiny rich kid narrator, Holden Caulfield. If you are among this crowd, read on. I had the same response when I first read it in 1964 at age nineteen.

Does it make sense to you that Holden was so traumatized by the deaths of his brother, Ailee, and his dorm-mate, James Castle, that he couldn't function? Today's diagnosis would be PTSD. Do you know anyone with that condition? If you did, you would recognize the symptoms in Holden.

Has anyone close to you died? Do you get it that people can be so torn up over the loss of a loved one that it takes them years to get over it unless they get professional help, if even then?

Does the book make sense to you knowing that Salinger himself spent time in a mental ward for "battle fatigue" during World War II after participating in the Normandy landing at Utah Beach, where he could see men, some perhaps close friends, cut to pieces and blown apart by German machine guns and artillery. He was also at the horrific Battle of the Bulge and other engagements, large and small, where American troops were decimated.

Salinger was among the first Allied soldiers to visit a concentration camp. He saw emaciated bodies piled up to be burned. Skeletal human remains were strewn about. The starved liberated prisoners were walking skeletons. "You could live a lifetime, Salinger told his daughter, "and never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose."

Does it make sense to you that someone who had experienced what Salinger had might acquire a heightened sense of compassion for his fellow man and want to protect the innocent and vulnerable? Doesn't it make sense that he could relieve his pain by creating a character like Holden to express those feelings? 

And doesn't this deeper perspective make the teenaged angst explanation of the book seem superficial, even dismissive?

Holden was almost seventeen and confronting the complications of life without much input from his parents, who themselves were probably still consumed by grief over Allie's death. Holden makes it clear on multiple occasions how alone he feels. PTSD could have made him edgy, jaded and negative.

All of life can be viewed from opposite poles, positive or negative. "Phony" is a term denoting a level of judgment that Holden's juvenile mind is too inexperienced to understand that people put up a social front often for valid reasons, with good intent. It's a defense mechanism, a tool for social navigation. Every human being has a public persona they polish to show the world, when deep inside they are scared little children or have other phobias or hangups.

The irony is that Holden thinks he is being cool by calling out the phoniness, when he has only skimmed the surface of humfan understanding. But at the end of the book he lets down his own defenses, "practically bawling" as he sits on the bench in the rain watching his sister Phoebe on the carousel: "She just looks so nice," he says, "in her blue coat, going around and around."

"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is playing as the carousel turns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2di83WAOhU  (As sung by The Platters a few years later.) Here are the opening lines: "They, asked me how I knew, our true love was true. I of course replied, Something here inside, Can not be denied."

The book is rich with deep insight into the humanity of an adolescent boy striving to understand the adult world he is growing into while weighed down by unresolved grief over the deaths of a brother and a friend. He is [spoiler] pulled back from the brink of running away by the innocence and unconditional love of Phoebe. 

Reading the book fifty years after my first experience, I could see that Holden's were happy tears because he could not deny the love of his devoted little sister, who had just fought furiously for his well-being. Because of her he got the mental health care he so desperately needed, in a cushy "rest home" in California, where his big brother could see him every weekend.

What can be greater than discovering you are loved and not alone?

The Catcher in the Rye is not so much a book for young adults or teenagers, although it is promoted that way because of Holden's age. The themes of compassion and mental illness and redemption are more adult in nature. The popular academic focus on teenage angst barely scratches the surface.  

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Schoolteacher Archetypes in The Catcher in the Rye

The teachers we remember are the ones who were really good and really bad. With Mr. Spencer and Mr. Antolini, Salinger delivers archetypes of these two extremes.

Salinger brands Mr. Spencer into our memory: [Holden's visiting Spencer in his apartment. He's been summoned there by Spencer, his history teacher, after Spencer learned Holden was being expelled for poor academic performance. Spencer reads to Holden from one of his exams.]

"Dear Mr. Spencer. That is all I know about the Egyptians. I can’t seem to get very interested in them although your lectures are very interesting. It is all right with me if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything else except English anyway. Respectfully yours, Holden Caulfield."

He put my goddam paper down then and looked at me like he’d just beaten hell out of me in ping-pong or something. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him for reading me that crap out loud. I wouldn’t’ve read it out loud to him if he’d written it—I really wouldn’t. In the first place, I’d only written that damn note so that he wouldn’t feel too bad about flunking me.

“Do you blame me for flunking you, boy?” he said.

“No, sir! I certainly don’t,’ I said. I wished to hell he’d stop calling me “boy” all the time. 

...

"What would you have done in my place?" he said. "Tell the truth, boy."

Well, you could see he really felt pretty lousy about flunking me. So I shot the bull for a while. I told him I was a real moron, and all that stuff. I told him how I would've done exactly the same thing if I'd been in his place, and how most people didn't appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull.

The funny thing is, though, I was sort of thinking of something else while I shot the bull. I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park Slouth. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go. I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondererd if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.

Holden has zoned out. Spencer is clueless about Holden's predicament, the crises he's going through. And all the teacher can think about is covering his ass and soothing his guilt at Holden's expense. He's kicking the boy while he's down instead of trying to understand. Some would call it tough love. I call it stupidity and incompetence.

Antolini, on the other hand, expresses empathy and offers Holden some very powerful advice.

A: "I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind...Are you listening to me?" [Remember, James Castle "fell" out of a window and Antolini picked up the body.]
..."It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. ...Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer." 
..."This fall I think you're riding for--it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who,at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave up before they even got started."
..."I don't want to scare you," he said, "but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause."
...'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.'"
..."you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
..."educated and scholarly men, if they'r brilliant and creative to begin with--which, unfortunately, is rarely the case--tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end."
..."Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it'll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it'll fit and, maybe, what it won't. After a while, you'll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don't suit you, aren't becoming to you. You'll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly." [Salinger explored and tried on a number of the world's religions and philosophies, including Yoga, Christian Science, Edgar Cayce and Scientology.]

One teacher kicks the boy while he's down; another tries to understand and help him. As archetypes, Spencer and Antolini have something to teach us. We've all seen them. Salinger's held up the mirror. Let's hope some teachers recognize their reflection.

It's clear the teacher wants to help Holden and gives him some inspiring advice, but if it's tainted by some animal lust to exploit the boy in a hyper-vulnerable state, then it's entirely different. But there's no compelling evidence of that. Stroking or patting Holden’s head is not a molestation, but it could have been an exploration for something further. Even today, a woman can stroke a boy's hair and people think she's being motherly. But let a man breathe on a child and it's interpreted differently.

It was taken that way by Holden, confusing and alarming him, but not traumatizing or Holden would not have kept the Stekel quote.

Here's  the text:
“I woke up all of a sudden. I don’t know what time it was or anything, but I woke up. I felt something on my head, some guy’s hand. Boy, it really scared hell out of me. What it was, it was Mr. Antolini’s hand. …he was sitting on the floor right next to the couch, in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head. Boy, I’ll bet I jumped about a thousand feet.
‘What the hellya doing?’ I said.
‘Nothing! I’m simply sitting here, admiring—‘
‘What’re ya doing, anyway?’ I said over again. I didn’t know what the hell to say—I mean I was embarrassed as hell.
‘How ‘bout keeping your voice down? ‘m simply sitting here—‘
‘I have to go, anyway,” I said—boy, was I nervous! I started putting on my damn pants in the dark. I could hardly get them on I was so damn nervous. I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they’re always being pervert when I’m around.’”

Holden misjudges Antolini and runs away from the only person who has so far understood his crisis and is compassionate enough to try and help.