The Catcher
in the Rye has been sitting on my
bookshelf for decades and I finally read it last week. After reading it, I know
why I could not engage myself in reading it in my 20s even though it was a book
much raved about by my circle of university friends then. The story is about
Holden Caulfield, an angry and lonely teenager who keeps dropping out of every
school he has been sent to. He has just been kicked out of Pencey Prep, a boarding school in Agerstown, Pennsylvania on account that he has not been applying
himself and has flunked four subjects and the only subject that he has passed
is English. After the Christmas vacation, he will not be returning to
Pencey, a school that has a very good academic rating.
The book is
written in Holden’s words. He is only sixteen and he is
already struggling with growing up and figuring out meaning of life. Holden has a gentle heart and he is
sensitive and kind although he rants about how all these friends and teachers
he has encountered at school are such phonies and he uses the words ‘phony’ and
‘jerks’ and swears profanity quite a lot. He gets upset when he sees how fake people are. The story spans three days during which time he went to the movie and there was this woman
sitting next to him cried all through the picture.
‘The part
that got me was , there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through
the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You’d have thought
she did it because she was kind-hearted as hell, but I was sitting next to her,
and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had
to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit
still and behave himself. She was about as kind-hearted as a goddam wolf. You
take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies,
and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding.’
Holden is generous. He lent his roommate Stradlater his jacket even after finding out that the latter was going out on a
date with Jane Gallagher, a childhood friend whom he likes a lot. He was asked by Stradlater to write the essay that the latter had to pass up the next
day. He was supposed to write something descriptive about a room or a house. He
ended up writing about his brother
Allie’s baseball mitt.
‘My brother
Allie had this left-handed fielder’s mitt. He was left-handed.The thing that
was descriptive about it , though, was that he had poems written all over the
fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so
that he’d have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at
bat. He’s dead now. He got
leukemia snd died when we
were up in Maine,on July 18,1946. You’d have liked him. He was two years
younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was
terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my
mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their
class. And they weren’t just shooting the crap.’
He loves his
younger sister, Phoebe very much and he is very protective of her innocence.
Phoebe is really smart and she’s had all A’s ever since she started school.
When she asked him to name one thing he liked, all he could think of were the
boy who jumped out of the window at school and the two nuns with suitcases and
he had sat next to them waiting for a train. They are teachers, one teaches English while the other one teaches History and Government.
Holden is sweet
as he thinks about the ducks that
swim around the lagoon in Central Park in springtime and he wants to know what
happen to them in the winter-time when the lake turns into a solid block of
ice, whether they get picked up by someone who comes around in a truck or go
south. When Phoebe asked him to name something he would like to be, he wanted to be the catcher in the rye. He
was referring to a poem by Robert Burns when he had thought it was a song and
his clever sister corrected him. He had thought the words were “If a body catch
a body coming through the rye" when the words were “If a body meet a body coming
through the rye.” Again old Phoebe corrected him.
‘ I thought
it was “ If a body catch a body”,’ I said. “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’d 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 know it’s crazy.’
Old Phoebe
didn’t say anything for a long time. Then , when she said something, all she
said was, ‘ Daddy’s going to kill you.’
Salinger’s seemingly effortless writing has cleverly described the growing pains of Holden Caulfield who is
disillusioned and feels depressed thinking about how hypocritical, pathetic and
mean many people are. I was hesitant to read The Catcher in the Rye probably because I did not want to read about
teenage angst and another one of those coming of age novels when I had felt a lot of it in my secondary school days. Since I
was twelve, I had kept a journal where I had expressed those angst and I intend
to destroy it soon. I did not want
to be reminded of any of that. As 2016 was winding
down, a friend sent me a link entitled thirty superb books you should read before
turning 30 and The Catcher in the Rye was one of them.click Though I had owned some of those
books before I turned 30, I have only read a couple of them (now three) and I do have every intention to read them at some point of time.
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