The Catcher in The Rye By J.D. Salinger Reading Response

“I’m just going through a phase right now.” (Salinger, 20)  The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, is a classic novel that created a generation of teen angst and rebellion.  I read The Catcher in the Rye as my book club book this year, and I really enjoyed it.  The book is filled with symbolism, strong ideas and themes that make the book so loved and important to American literature.  The main character, Holden, gets kicked out of school but decides to leave sooner than expected and travels to New York.  Holden is an anti-hero, in his journey to NY, he constantly fails when trying to accomplish different goals he has.  Throughout the book, Holden deals with an inner conflict of his maturity.  He always seems to claim that he is immature, but really he makes different decisions that show that he actually is mature.   Throughout the book and my book club discussions, I saw that a common theme is Holden’s struggles with immaturity.

            There is a detail in the beginning of the book where Holden mentions the way his hair looks: “One side of my head – The right side – is full of millions of grey hairs…  I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve… Sometimes I act a lot older than I am… but people never notice it.” (Salinger, 13)  This detail represents Holden’s inner conflicts of immaturity, how the grey side is the older version of himself and the black side is the younger side.  Also, Holden thinks of himself as acting young a lot but he can also act old.

In the middle of the book, Holden is talking to an old friend of his, who says: “Your mind is immature.”  (Salinger, 191)  Holden agrees. He uses an example of how he tried to have sex with a girl, he says he cant “get sexy” with a girl unless he really likes her.  He and his friend both agree that that means Holden is immature.  But actually, they are quite wrong. Holden is very mature in the exactly the way that he thought of himself as immature, he wants to connect with another person on a deeper level, and not just have sexual intercourse with them.  Holden is very mature in how he describes his (lack of a) sex life.

At a very important part of the book, Holden is with his young sister, Phoebe.  She says to him: “Name something you’d like to be.  Like a scientist.  Or a lawyer or something.”  He is discussing how he couldn’t be either of the things she mentioned.  Then he decides what he wants to be ‘the catcher in the rye’ a poem that he had misheard, the real line of the poem is ‘if a body meets a body coming through the rye’ but Holden misheard the poem, thinking that it was ‘If a body catch a body coming through the rye.’  The original version has to do with sex, that’s why the bodies ‘meet’ but Holden interpreted his mishearing to be very different: “I keep picturing all these kids playing some game in a 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 off 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 what I’d do all day; I’d just be the catcher in the rye.”  (Salinger, 224)  That was what he wanted to do when he grew up, save the kid’s innocence and keep them on the cliff of childhood.  There are two ways to look at his idea of his ‘dream job.’ One is the ways he is being mature, saving these kids from falling to their death.  The other, is how the only thing he really wants to do, doesn’t exist in the real world, and he can’t actually do it.

Holden struggles with his immaturity, being thought of as young, but acting old, thinking of himself as young but really being old, and his aspirations being serious but impossible.  Holden did start out as being immature, but by the end of the book grew up a lot because of his journey to New York.  In the final chapter of the book, the reader finds out he goes back to school and starts to plan his future.

Works Cited

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. 1979 ed. New York City: Little, Brown

     and Company, 1945. Print.