Catcher in the Rye

An outsider looking in, estranged from everyone. Holden describes having a panic attack and barely being able to walk down the street. It was a favorite novel for a long time but I don't need to revisit it.

I can’t believe this is still being pressed upon teenagers.

Every disaffected teen thinks they are Holden Caulfield. They’re able to project all of their own insecurities and neuroses onto him. That’s why it remains a popular book to teach to high schoolers. I think it’s finally reaching the point where it’s so obviously a product of its time that it’s less relatable, much like other books like The Outsiders or A Separate Peace, but it will continue to be taught for a while.

I'd like to think kids would still relate to some of it. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't strike them as being as transgressive as the boomers did though.

“I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes....If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.”

“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.”

“I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.

Maybe you can just point out to your students that it was a product of its time. That it was appreciated by a couple of generations for ___X___ reasons.

I don't think you can make it enjoyable in and of itself, though.

So help me, it made me want to assassinate the president!!!

It did a lot of normalize anal sex for a generation of teenagers.

group presentations by chapter.

takes a week and no one has to read the whole thing, even you.

find some current item that relates.

you're welcome.

Salinger wrote a fine book about a teenage. He didn't write it FOR teenagers.

OP Can you explain why you "have to" teach it? Especially since you judge it to be "tiresome...shit".

R9 here *about a teenager*

I read it a few years ago and didn't mind it. Probably one of those books that clicks with some people and not others. I didn't love it while reading it but afterwards the story and character stayed with me more than a lot of other books. It doesn't help if you go into it thinking it's this famous classic because that sets an expectation.

I think readers who say they didnt like, or outright hate CITR were REQUIRED (forced) to read it at too young an age (high school). I urge you OP to try reading it again . You may find you like it because much of the subtext, (such as Holden being a victim of sexual molestation,) is clearer to an adult.

You mean your school district hasn't banned it yet? Give them time.

This probably comes across as old-timey dreck to kids these days. Good luck!

Maybe someone should write a novel for this generation.

Using emojis.

I read it 40 years ago but must have missed the anal sex part. Can someone please explain?

Haha, OP. I thought I was the only teenager who thought this book was over-rated shit. Classic, my ass.

It's a mashup of a coming of age story and watered down Nietzsche starring an unlikable unreliable highly impulsive (also highly neurotic) and eccentric (mentally unstable teenager (most likely asperger's or ADHD or a combination of the two) hypocritically ranting about those he perceives as "phonies."

It's a decent book but like Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby it suffers from legions of fans liking or identifying with it for all the wrong reasons. Mainly on a superficial level.

I thought the kid would be described as having anxiety due to trauma, his younger brother died and he did not process that loss .

I did enjoy The Great Gatsby, but never identified with the titular character or the narrator. I just liked it for the story of a different time and place that I'd never otherwise know.

R16, there is no sex at all, anal or otherwise.

I read it for the first time about 6 months ago. I thought Holden was a self-absorbed shallow, rich kid bore. I don't understand why it has been an iconic novel.

It did make me long for the days before cell phones, computers and ever-present surveillance when people actually lived in raw reality.

The Great Gatsby was a better book. You don't have to identify with the characters.

I had to read both Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby, and I don't remember either of them. But Orwell's 1984? [bold]That[/bold] I remember.

OP, if your students haven't read that by the time they get to you, make sure they do.

To love The Catcher in The Rye, I think you have to read it between the ages of 14 to 16, at a time when you are developing the instinctive feeling that a lot of what you are told to to think about the world is meaningless bullshit.

If you read it in your thirties or forties, that central truth of the book is so self-evident that Holden sounds like a dimwit bore rather than a struggling but strangely insightful youngster.

Any chance you can swap it out for a REAL classic, like "Valley of the Dolls"?

Holden is very funny, has funny observations and yes, he's very judgmental but aren't we all. I was interested to learn Oona O'Neil was the inspiration for a character.

It was required reading in 7th grade when I was a kid, I loved it but I can't explain why. It stays with me though, things remind me of the book - Rockefeller Center, The Lunts, seeing "fuck you" written everywhere, Vicks Nose Drops.

A friend and I plotted for years how to get over Salinger's wall (i lived in Vermont then) and the last time I had cause to be in Windsor I took extra time hanging around because i was sure he'd wander by in his quest for the post office but he didn't.

[quote] To love The Catcher in The Rye, I think you have to read it between the ages of 14 to 16, at a time when you are developing the instinctive feeling that a lot of what you are told to to think about the world is meaningless bullshit.

That's when I read it, R24, and thought it was all a pompous bore. I think it has more to do with the type of person reading it.

R21 Thank you - I would hate to think I missed that.

It's about a bossy bottom in a Jewish deli.

I love it. I like John Green's take.

Everyone from James Dean to Jerry Lewis wanted to make this movie. Salinger forbade it his entire life. And so far, his estate is adhering to his wishes.

Woody basically made a version of it with Timmy. And Igby Goes Down with Kieren Culkin was also a version of it.

On whom did Igby go down?

"Daria" was also a version of the novel.

OP, pretending to be stupid for us is so much easier for you because you ARE that stupid, right?

Yes.

Of course.

R17 and R21 are absolutely fucking correct!!

Holden is a BORE.

It probably belonged to a particular place and time. It was unlike anything before it. Now, it just seems like a story about an unhappy, rich prepster.

Very little mid-century fiction seems to be surviving and no talked about Bellow, Updike and most of the others once they died. I think Roth is the one author whose work will continue to be read and it will be his late stuff.

[quote] I read it 40 years ago but must have missed the anal sex part. Can someone please explain?

There's no anal sex in it. You're confusing it with "Anne of Green Gables."

I preferred both "Separate Peace" (and it's vague homo subtext) and "Lord of the Flies" compared to "Catcher in the Rye" when it comes juvenile male angst.

I also disagree with R37's take. The 1950s were replete with teenagers calling out bourgeois bullshit. Hell, just look at James Dean.

r15, the last part of your post literally made me LOL!

Thank you for cheering up my Monday morning.

What r24 said. If it has to be read, do it when you’re an angsty teenager. Our school read Separate Peace instead. When I read Catcher as an adult, I thought it was tedious.

If you really want to torment your class, have them read Death Be Not Proud.

It was banned in my high school (early 70s Boston suburb) but was read by the cooler smart kids. Funny to see it go onto required reading lists in high schools and then down to junior highs. Any teacher teaching it today is a burnout who hasn’t had an original thought in decades.

Do teachers choose the reading curriculum? I figured that was mandated by the school board and/or principal. Maybe they're given an approved list from which to pick?

The reading age of high school kids has declined dramatically over the last couple of generations. They did a survey of favourite books of Australian kids in the most senior three years of secondary school recently, and all of them were rated by the authorities as the level that the average Grade 5-7 reader would cope with. A lot of Harry Potter, etc. The only one on the list that a boomer would recognise as "literary" was To Kill a Mockingbird, and that was also the only one that was not broadly contemporary. As a boomer, we were reading Dickens and Patrick White in senior secondary, inside and outside school. So no wonder kids can't get their heads round Catcher. I don't think it's a great book, and it has dated, but it has a level of irony that's way beyond that level of reading.

You also have to remember that senior school and college students of the same era were into Camus (The Outsider) and Sartre, so the romance of alienation from society was big with them. Of course, alienation was such a big trend that you belonged better if you were into it: which is the same level of irony Salinger is going for.

I guess the reading levels are another wonderful impact of social media.

Holden Caufield grew up to be Patrick Bateman

R42 interesting. I was in a suburb of Boston as well, required reading, not banned. So I'm guessing you're not talking about Newton.

The OO sounds like someone who should not be teaching.

OP , not OO

Gotta love the troll.

Especially while stuffing dog shit into her fresh wounds.

The abducted Miranda Grey character in Jown Fowles's 1970s thriller "The Collector" is both sympathetic and gently mocked by the author for her youthful pretentiousness. When the formally uneducated protagonist, Frederick (whom she has nicknamed "Caliban") tellls her he read the novel but "doesn't see much point in it," she replies: "You do realize it's one of the most brilliant studies of adolescence ever written?" You sense the author is having a bit of fun with the character.

R13 where is the sexual molestation of Holden. I read that book twice in the 9th grade and all I remember are the swans and his sister, and that he guy he hates but is secretly attracted to. When does Diddy appear?

Just google teaching guides for Catcher in the Rye.

You'll get a plethora of hits, such as:

[quote]On whom did Igby go down?

Oh dear. Did you mean to write, “Down on whom did Igby go?”

I loved it when I was a junior in high school. I tried to revisit it when I was maybe 30 and couldn't get through it.

The Bell Jar is far superior.

R9 Has it right. Those of college age and young adults are more likely to appreciate it than middle and high school students do. I read it at age 16 and it really hit for me, but I was sort of the exception in my class. I still appreciate it it 4 decades later, but it's of course no longer my favorite book.

I watched Igby Goes Down a few months ago and I can definitely see the connection, r32. Very insightful.

R55 Yes it is. Far more realistic and relatable.

Salinger wrote the book when he was in the war . I only learned that as an adult. It’s one of my favorite books. Salinger based many of the characters on people in his life.

I loved his relationship with his sister Phoebe . I am sentimental. I remember my high school teacher asking us what the author meant by quoting Holden asking where do the birds go when it rains.

Years later I discovered that the entire narrative was written by Holden when he was in a psych hospital.

Themes in adolescent inspired literature are universal. Everything does not have to be in lockstep with all the drivel we are so accustomed to. I especially like one of the last lines : whatever you do, don’t go telling everybody everything about you; you’ll just end up missing everyone like crazy .

Idea : ask your students to write a short narrative re: what would Holden have to say today about his life ….

Reagan supporters hate the novel

It's meh. It's certainly no "The Stranger"

R53, no.

There are far more boring and irrelevant books that we were required to read in HS.

It was a slog. The only book that we were required to read that I liked was To Kill a Mockingbird.

Seeing the word 'crap' on the first page was enough to make it an angst-y favorite to Boomer high schoolers and wannabe cool English teachers.

No real teacher would dismiss a writer with the gifts of Salinger as a writer of "tiresome shit". OP is full of tiresome shit herself.

I think I had to read it but have no memory of that book. Underwhelmed.

I don't know you guys. I think it's a fantastic book, and one that made me feel less alone as a closeted gay teen. I sorta fell in love with Holden at the time.

I was once reading it and Holden was describing being on a train from Princeton to New York, and he describes pulling into Newark station. Thing is, I swear on my life, I looked out the windows and my train was pulling through Newark station at the very same time!

Spooky, no?

R66 I agree Salinger is great but his short stories about the Glass family are much better examples of his skill.

Let's not mention his love of young girls.

I read this in 11th grade, on my own. We weren't "taught" it; what's to teach? It's a funny and poignant tale of adolescent angst about the "goddam" world of "phonies." Kids don't need to be "taught" in a formal class by adults on how to understand this novel.

Two assassins carried Catcher with them at the time...John Hinckley (Reagan), Arthur Bremer (George Wallace). Neither attempt was successful but the coincidence was wierd.

OP is so world weary. I would have hated to have had an English teacher like him.

Buy a study guide on the novel, OP.

My favorite novel. I wish I could write like that.

In 7th grade I was assigned the task of writing a book report on Catcher in the Rye. Everyone (15 or 20 of us) had a different book to write about, and the reason was to see how well each of us transcribed the basis and meaning of their particular book. I was thrilled that I got a short book but I was bored by it after about 50 pages. I decided rather than finish it I'd read Cliff notes and some additional interpretations of my book. Yea me. I received the best grade in the class, A+, and a glowing testimony from my teacher about what an exceptional job I did evaluating and explaining my book. After cheating my way through this I actually read the damn book and didn't like or really understand it. The part about Holden standing in the field at the end... WTH.

R72 also Mark David Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon.

They’re still making kids read this? It’s very of its time and not in a good way like the classics.

For me, as a teen in the early 90s, pre-internet, etc, it was the first time I realized I wasn't the only one with a sardonic monologue laughing at the stupidity of everything looping in my head at all times. It was quite shocking to me at the time. It's one fucking funny book. They couldn't teach it in our school bc of all the goddam 'goddams.' I'm glad I read it for fun, as I hate every book I was forced to read. I hope to be dead before they finally find a loophole to make it into a movie.

R76 Forgot about him...thanks. Such an odd connection.

Colden was a repressed homosexual teen. And they still exist. I know one now. All that "flit" talk. The book is still relevant. Every kid should still read it.

Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, is a coming-of-age novel that has left an indelible mark on American literature. The story is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a disenchanted teenager who has been expelled from numerous preparatory schools. As Holden recounts his experiences over a few days in New York City, readers gain insight into his struggles with identity, societal expectations, and the loss of innocence.l.

Fun fact: "Pencey Prep" is based on the real Valley Forge Military Academy, attended for a time by Salinger.

R75, What? You wrote a report on "The Catcher in the Rye" and yet were (are?) baffled by a final scene of the main character's STANDING IN A FIELD? OF RYE, MAYBE? AS A CATCHER, MAYBE?

Think about it.

R71 here. Maybe some aspects of this book do need to be elucidated by an adult.

I still remember buying this book as a teenager and being so underwhelmed when I actually read it. South Park summed it up well.

I felt the same way after reading " The Scarlet Letter" in 9th grade. I asked the teacher," Who decided that this was a classic?"

R8 this

R75 7th grade is too young to understand and appreciate the book. You have to be at least 15-16 to get really get it.

R84, I hope your teacher replied, "Brilliant minds before us."

To the unready, genius will always be as pearls before swine. No offense to the swine, but to its prior education.

I understood The Scarlett Letter, read it in high school& at college.

It was good to be a man, bad to be a woman!

How can you teach a book without having read it?

To R83, South Park is correct.

[quote]I understood The Scarlett Letter

You just didn't learn how to spell it.

^^^ My Bad R91^^^

I read it once in my twenties. I guess I'd grown so inured to "swearing" that I don't remember that being part of it. As far as the story, and its hero, go, I neither loved it nor hated them. I hoped for a bit that Holden might be gay, but that wasn't happening. I had forgotten Catcher until this thread appeared yesterday.

[quote]I understood The Scarlett Letter, read it in high school& at college. It was good to be a man, bad to be a woman!

My hs classmate, when asked what the message of the Scarlet Letter was said," Keep it zipped when you go into the woods."

The Catcher in the Rye takes the loss of innocence as its primary concern. Holden wants to be the “catcher in the rye”—someone who saves children from falling off a cliff, which can be understood as a metaphor for entering adulthood

Noooooo!!!

Salinger was no moi.

Novella [italic]Young Törless[/italic], by Robert Musil, is the way to go for this kind of literature.

Salinger would be outed as a pedo now. My guess is the only reason Joyce Maynard hasn't done so is that she's made a good career for herself without him.

R99 Do you know what the term pedophile means? Maynard was a freshman at Yale when she chose to be with Salinger. (The Washington Post book review called her Memoir "indescribably stupid". Love that.)

Holden has a physical fight with his roommate and leaves school. At one point, ( he's running low on cash) he winds up sleeping on the couch of a favorite former teacher..he falls asleep and wakes up to the guy stroking his hair.

Holden is creeped out and leaves, he mentions this type of thing has happened a few times in his life and it always freaks him out.

He is disgusted by the incident and blown away this respected teacher is just another sex pest.

To be clear, there's no mention of sex, rape or assault. .

Holden had the fight with his roommate in a jealous rage because an ex-girlfriend went on a date with the guy. The roommate is described by Holden as conventionally attractive and aggressive with girls, won't take no for an answer.

It's implied in the novel, the ex-girlfriend received too much unwanted attention from her step-father. There's a symmetry between the two characters fighting off unwelcome advances... from men.

OP you think that you skimmed it at fourteen and you say that it’s a tiresome piece of shit and now you’ve come to the DL for advice on how to teach it to your students.

The American education system is in good hands, OP!

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was my Catcher in the Rye. As a teen I really could identify with the gay guy drawn like a moth to the manic pixie dream girl.

The Bell Jar was my Catcher in the Rye,

R80 he talks about how it's weird when other guys talk to him in the men's room while he's taking a dump.

I'm going to put my hand up as an admirer of The Catcher in the Rye.

Outside of Lolita, I can think of no other classic American novel so misinterpreted.

What Salinger is showing is the effect of familial death on a fragile pubescent male.

Holden is experiencing what we now think of as post-traumatic stress disorder.

He cannot disengage from the death of his sibling. His alienation causes him to view the world of people without that trauma as being inherently "phony". The "unreality" of life in general continuing after the death of an individual is the source of his alienage, but he cannot understand this and the adults in his life have not realized what he is experiencing.

"In their biography of Salinger, David Shields and Shane Salerno argue that: "The Catcher in the Rye can best be understood as a disguised war novel." Salinger witnessed the horrors of World War II, but rather than writing a combat novel, Salinger, according to Shields and Salerno, "took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel."

I hope you’re not pushing this book on celiacs in your class OP because rye contains gluten.

A substitute teacher out on Long lsland was dropped from his job for fighting with a student. A few weeks later, he returned to the classroom, shot the student - unsuccessfully, held the class hostage, and then shot himself - successfully. This fact caught my eye. Last sentence, Times - 'A neighbor described the teacher as a nice boy, always reading Catcher in the Rye.'

This nit-wit Chapman, who shot John Lennon, said he did it because he wanted to draw the attention of the world to Catcher in the Rye, and the reading of this book would be his defense.

Young Hinckley, the whiz kid who shot Reagan and his press secretary, said: 'If you want my defense, all you have to do is read Catcher in the Rye.'...

I borrowed a copy from a young friend of mine, because I wanted to see what she had underlined. And I read this book to find out why this touching, beautiful, sensitive story, published in July 1951, had turned into this manifesto of hate. I started reading. It's exactly as I had remembered. Everybody's a phony. Page two - 'My brother's in Hollywood being a prostitute.' Page three - "What a phony slob his father was.' Page nine - 'People never notice anything.' Then, on page 22, my hair stood up. Well. Remember Holden Caulfield, the definitive sensitive youth wearing his red hunter's cap? A deer hunter's cap? 'Like hell it is. I sort of closed one eye like I was taking aim at it.' 'This is a people shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat.'

This book is preparing people for bigger moments in their lives than I had ever dreamed of. Then, on page 89, 'I'd rather push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an axe than sock him in the jaw.' 'I hate fistfights. What scares me most is the other guy's face.' I finished the book. It's touching and comic. The boy wants to do so much and can't do anything. Hates all phoniness and only lies to others. Wants everyone to like him but is only hateful and is completely self involved. In other words, a pretty accurate picture of a male adolescent.

What alarms me about the book - not the book so much as the aura about it - is this. The book is primarily about paralysis. The boy can't function. At the end, before he can run away and start a new life, it starts to rain. He folds. There's nothing wrong in writing about emotional and intellectual paralysis. It may, thanks to Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, be the great modern theme...

The aura around Salinger's book - which, perhaps, should be read by everyone but young men - is this. It mirrors like a fun-house mirror, and amplifies like a distorted speaker one of the great tragedies of our times - the death of the imagination. Because what else is paralysis? The imagination has been so debased that imagination - being imaginative, rather than being the linch pin of our existence, now stands as a synonym for something outside ourselves. Like science fiction. Or some new use for tangerine slices on raw pork chops - 'What an imaginative summer recipe.' And Star Wars - 'so imaginative'. And Star Trek - 'so imaginative'. And Lord of the Rings, all those dwarves - 'so imaginative'.

The imagination has moved out of the realm of being our link, our most personal link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world, this world we share. What is schizophrenia but a horrifying state where what's in here doesn't match what's out there?

Why has imagination become a synonym for style? I believe the imagination is the passport that we create to help take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is merely another phrase for what is most uniquely us. Jung says, 'The greatest sin is to be unconscious.' Our boy Holden says, 'What scares me most is the other guy's face.' 'It wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded.' Most of the time, the faces that we face are not the other guys', but our own faces. And it is the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself that you put blindfolds on rather than deal

I feel it speaks to the teenage experience, when you start realizing how much of a social mask we wear, how we need to start making concessions that don't feel authentic to us in how we behave and act to survive in a society. It spoke to mine. I could empathize with Holden, then. I read it now and can't connect to it in the same way, but I still think it speaks of that experience beautifully. It's about the shittiness of growing up.

Holden wasn't gay but I bet the guy they threw out the window, that was wearing Holden's turtleneck, was.

R77 you're an idiot. That's it.