My Book Report: The Catcher in the Rye
Sep. 10th, 2011 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coffeeteaandmeI've been hearing about this book for ages, so I decided to read it. My first thought upon finishing it has been that perhaps I should have read it as a teenager, because spending three days as an adult listening to this poor little rich boy whine about his life using the same five superlatives over and over was as accurate a portrayal of Hell as I could manage to imagine, except actually being the poor bastard who was having such a hard time of it. But Salinger originally wrote the book for an adult audience, not children, so I might have gotten more of what he originally intended out of it.
See, Holden is not actually what teenagers get out of him: he's not a 'typical teenager' voicing the angst of his age. Holden is supposed to be mentally ill, having a breakdown that began with his brother dying three years ago, exacerbated by having no guidance through his grief, and brought to a point by his family's repeated expectations of academic excellence without regard to his mental state. He stopped growing emotionally when his brother died, so although he's reportedly very smart, and in fact going to school with people two years his senior, he has the emotional maturity and reactions of someone who is 13. His nature is currently defined by an overwhelming dissatisfaction with and inability to connect with nearly any person, institution or action he encounters, even ones he initially likes or later misses. In short, Holden is a caricature of teen angst.
The novel falls down in two places for me here. First, the point of view is presented as that of an exceptionally perceptive young man, but in fact Holden is so eaten up by his own negativity that his opinions are the highly skewed vision of someone dealing with mental issues that have nothing to do with what he's commenting on. As such, the idea that his opinions can be thought of as at all representative of an observant or insightful point of view is dismaying. I am tempted to accuse Mr. Salinger of flattering himself via his own character, by casting himself as a brilliant mind tragically stopped in its own flowering.
What happens instead is that we get Salinger's impression of what a sensitive, intelligent boy might say if he were in the midst of a nervous breakdown, dumbed down to be more accessible to a larger audience, so we simply get a teenager's skewed, disaffected vision of the world with only the nominal blessings of other characters to imply that he is at all exceptional. I just don't buy it.
Second, Holden is portrayed many times as being thought of as a promising young writer, among the best of his class. But his style is so relentlessly banal, repetitive and full of poor grammar that it is difficult to imagine him earning the kind of favor his teachers seem to heap upon him. The character has been sent to the best schools, and English is his best subject; one would assume he knows how to construct a sentence. The story being related is presumably one that the character cares about, one he might be putting forth his best efforts in relating. Instead he apparently chooses to write the way he verbally speaks, a way in which he admits he expresses himself most poorly, and in which he has gotten his worst grades. The resulting syntax is nearly tortuous to read, like listening to a piece of music being played by an out of tune instrument.
Holden's reactions are typical, not exceptional, of what Salinger portrays (versus what he intends): an emotionally stunted and mentally ill young man caught in a cycle of entering and dropping out of school. Holden cannot be blamed for being in such a state: he has experienced emotional damage. What removes him from the ranks of exceptional young men is that he in no way seems to understand where he stands. In the end Holden is still in the same frame of mind he was in at the start of the book, he is no further in his self-knowledge than he was before. With no goals, no perspective, his intent to return to school is not likely to meet with any greater success than it did before. It is a portrait of a character 'as is', stuck in a mental dead end, the only hope implied in a process of therapy which hasn't begun yet.
I think this book attained a status and a niche the author did not originally intend, and become so many things to so many people that he is right to not only have remained utterly silent about the book, but never to have written a sequel, and denied all attempts by others to do so, or to turn the story into a movie. My guess is that if such a thing should happen, the inconsistencies of the story as read versus the story as written may be further pointed up to future readers.
See, Holden is not actually what teenagers get out of him: he's not a 'typical teenager' voicing the angst of his age. Holden is supposed to be mentally ill, having a breakdown that began with his brother dying three years ago, exacerbated by having no guidance through his grief, and brought to a point by his family's repeated expectations of academic excellence without regard to his mental state. He stopped growing emotionally when his brother died, so although he's reportedly very smart, and in fact going to school with people two years his senior, he has the emotional maturity and reactions of someone who is 13. His nature is currently defined by an overwhelming dissatisfaction with and inability to connect with nearly any person, institution or action he encounters, even ones he initially likes or later misses. In short, Holden is a caricature of teen angst.
The novel falls down in two places for me here. First, the point of view is presented as that of an exceptionally perceptive young man, but in fact Holden is so eaten up by his own negativity that his opinions are the highly skewed vision of someone dealing with mental issues that have nothing to do with what he's commenting on. As such, the idea that his opinions can be thought of as at all representative of an observant or insightful point of view is dismaying. I am tempted to accuse Mr. Salinger of flattering himself via his own character, by casting himself as a brilliant mind tragically stopped in its own flowering.
What happens instead is that we get Salinger's impression of what a sensitive, intelligent boy might say if he were in the midst of a nervous breakdown, dumbed down to be more accessible to a larger audience, so we simply get a teenager's skewed, disaffected vision of the world with only the nominal blessings of other characters to imply that he is at all exceptional. I just don't buy it.
Second, Holden is portrayed many times as being thought of as a promising young writer, among the best of his class. But his style is so relentlessly banal, repetitive and full of poor grammar that it is difficult to imagine him earning the kind of favor his teachers seem to heap upon him. The character has been sent to the best schools, and English is his best subject; one would assume he knows how to construct a sentence. The story being related is presumably one that the character cares about, one he might be putting forth his best efforts in relating. Instead he apparently chooses to write the way he verbally speaks, a way in which he admits he expresses himself most poorly, and in which he has gotten his worst grades. The resulting syntax is nearly tortuous to read, like listening to a piece of music being played by an out of tune instrument.
Holden's reactions are typical, not exceptional, of what Salinger portrays (versus what he intends): an emotionally stunted and mentally ill young man caught in a cycle of entering and dropping out of school. Holden cannot be blamed for being in such a state: he has experienced emotional damage. What removes him from the ranks of exceptional young men is that he in no way seems to understand where he stands. In the end Holden is still in the same frame of mind he was in at the start of the book, he is no further in his self-knowledge than he was before. With no goals, no perspective, his intent to return to school is not likely to meet with any greater success than it did before. It is a portrait of a character 'as is', stuck in a mental dead end, the only hope implied in a process of therapy which hasn't begun yet.
I think this book attained a status and a niche the author did not originally intend, and become so many things to so many people that he is right to not only have remained utterly silent about the book, but never to have written a sequel, and denied all attempts by others to do so, or to turn the story into a movie. My guess is that if such a thing should happen, the inconsistencies of the story as read versus the story as written may be further pointed up to future readers.
