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The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, the novel has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking world; it has also been translated into almost all of the world's major languages.
Around 250,000 copies are sold each year, with total sales of more than sixty-five million.
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Quotations
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."
So long,.
I said. I didn't thank her or anything. I'm glad I didn't.
You don't like anything that's happening.
It made me even more depressed when she said that.
After the Christmas thing was over, the goddam picture started. It was so putrid I couldn't take my eyes off it.
All of a sudden, I decided what I'd really do, I'd get the hell out of Pencey-right that same night and all.
Everything I had was bourgeois as hell. Even my fountain pen was bourgeois. He borrowed it off me all the time, but it was bourgeois anyway.
Encyclopedia
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, the novel has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking world; it has also been translated into almost all of the world's major languages.
Around 250,000 copies are sold each year, with total sales of more than sixty-five million. The novel's antihero, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion and defiance.
The novel was chosen by Time among the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, and by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the United States for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage angst.
Plot summary
The first-person narrative follows Holden's experiences in New York City in the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a fictional college preparatory school in Pennsylvania.
Holden shares encounters he has had with students and faculty of Pencey, whom he criticizes as being superficial, or as he would say, "phony." After being expelled from the school, Holden packs up and leaves the school in the middle of the night after an altercation with his roommate. He takes a train to New York, but does not want to return to his family's apartment immediately, and instead checks into the derelict Edmont Hotel. There, he spends an evening dancing with three tourist girls and has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute; he refuses to do anything with her and tells her to leave, although he pays her for her time. She demands more money than was originally agreed upon and when Holden refuses to pay he receives a smackdown from her pimp.
Holden spends a total of two days in the city, characterized largely by drunkenness and loneliness. At one point he ends up at a museum, where he contrasts his life with the statues of Eskimos on display. For as long as he can remember, the statues have been fixed and unchanging. It is clear to the reader, if not to Holden, that the teenager is afraid and nervous about the process of change and growing up. These concerns may largely have stemmed from the death of his brother, Allie. Eventually, he sneaks into his parents' apartment while they are away, to visit his younger sister Phoebe, who is nearly the only person with whom he seems to be able to communicate. Holden shares a fantasy he has been thinking about (based on a mishearing of Robert Burns' Comin' Through the Rye): he pictures himself as the sole guardian of numerous children running and playing in a huge rye field on the edge of a cliff. His job is to catch the children if they wander close to the brink; to be a "catcher in the rye".
After leaving his parents' apartment, Holden then drops by to see his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini in the middle of the night, and is offered advice on life and a place to sleep. During the speech on life, Mr. Antolini has a number of "highballs," an alcoholic drink popular at the time. His comfort is upset when he wakes up in the night to find Mr. Antolini patting his head in a way that seems "perverty." There is much speculation on whether or not Mr. Antolini was making a sexual advance on Holden, and it is left widely up to the reader whether or not this is true. Holden leaves and spends his last afternoon wandering the city. He later wonders if his interpretation of Mr. Antolini's actions was correct.
Holden intends to move out west, and relays these plans to his sister, who decides she wants to go with him. He refuses to take her, instead telling her that he himself will no longer go. Holden then takes Phoebe to the Central Park Zoo, where he watches with a melancholy joy as she rides a carousel. At the close of the book, Holden decides not to mention much about the present day, finding it inconsequential. It becomes clear that he is currently in some type of mental institution as he refers to himself as "sick" and writes about talking to a psychoanalyst. He does mention that he'll be attending another school in September, and that he has found himself missing Stradlater, Ackley, and the others--warning the reader that the same thing could happen to them.
Interpretation
Writer Bruce Brooks noted that Holden's attitude remains unchanged at story's end, implying no maturation, thus differentiating the novel from young adult fiction.
Analogously, Louis Menand says teachers assign it because of the optimistic ending, to teach adolescent readers that "alienation is just a phase";
while Brooks maintains that Holden acts his age, Menand observed that Holden thinks as an adult, given his ability to accurately perceive people and their motives. The Catcher in the Rye has been interpreted as positing only a negative answer to the social problems it criticizes; its philosophy is negatively compared with that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Each Caulfield child has literary talent: D.B. writes screenplays in Hollywood; Holden passed his English course, though failed everything else; Allie writes poetry; and Phoebe is a diarist. Moreover, her character is an important influence upon Holden; her name denotes and derives from the Greek Phoibus — the Greek god for the sun and the moon, suggesting she is oracle and catalyst for the boy who sees himself as the catcher in the rye at a cliff-side rye field where children play tag, whom he catches, and saves from themselves, when they stray too near the edge.
This "catcher in the rye", is an analogy for Holden who sees these children playing tag as innocent and pure. Falling off the cliff would be a progression into adulthood and maturity (which he often views as a digression from this innocence into a negative world). Later, Phoebe and Holden exchange roles as the Catcher and the Fallen; he gives her his hunting hat, the catcher's symbol, and becomes the fallen as Phoebe becomes the catcher.
Controversy
In 1960, a teacher was fired, and later reinstated, for assigning the novel in class. Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States.
In 1981, it was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States.
According to the American Library Association, The Catcher in the Rye was the thirteenth most frequently challenged book from 1990–2000.
It was one of the ten most challenged books in 2005, and came off the list in 2006.
The challenges generally begin with vulgar language, citing the novel's use of words like fuck and "goddam", with more general reasons including sexual references, blasphemy, undermining of family values and moral codes, Holden's being a poor role model, encouragement of rebellion, and promotion of drinking, smoking, lying, and promiscuity.
Often, the challengers have been unfamiliar with the plot itself. Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher who faced objections after assigning the novel in her class, noted that the challengers "are being just like Holden ... They are trying to be catchers in the rye." A reverse effect has been that this incident caused people to put themselves on the waiting list to borrow the novel, when there were none before.
Mark David Chapman's shooting of John Lennon, John Hinckley, Jr.'s assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, and other murders have been associated with the novel.
Attempted film adaptations
Early in his career, J. D. Salinger expressed a willingness to have his work adapted for the screen. However, in 1949, a critically panned film version of his short story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was released; renamed My Foolish Heart and taking great liberties with Salinger's plot, the film is widely considered to be among the reasons that Salinger has refused to allow any subsequent movie adaptations of his work. The enduring popularity of The Catcher in the Rye, however, has resulted in repeated attempts to secure the novel's screen rights.
When The Catcher in the Rye was first released, many offers were made to adapt it for the screen; among them was Sam Goldwyn, producer of My Foolish Heart. In a letter written in the early fifties, Salinger spoke of mounting a play in which he would play the role of Holden Caulfield opposite Margaret O'Brien, and, if he couldn’t play the part himself, to “forget about it." Almost fifty years later, the writer Joyce Maynard definitively concluded, "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger."
Salinger told Maynard in the seventies that Jerry Lewis "tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden," despite Lewis not having read the novel until he was in his thirties. Celebrities ranging from Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio have since made efforts to make a film adaptation. In an interview with Premiere magazine, John Cusack commented that his one regret about turning twenty-one was that he had become too old to play Holden Caulfield. Writer-director Billy Wilder recounted his abortive attempts to snare the novel's rights:
In 1961, Salinger denied Elia Kazan permission to direct a stage adaptation of Catcher for Broadway. More recently, Salinger's agents received bids for the Catcher movie rights from Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg, neither of which was even passed on to Salinger for consideration.
In 2003, the BBC television program The Big Read featured The Catcher in the Rye, intercutting discussions of the novel with "a series of short films that featured an actor playing Salinger's adolescent antihero, Holden Caulfield." The show defended its unlicensed adaptation of the novel by claiming to be a "literary review," and no major charges were filed.
According to a speculative article in The Guardian in May 2006, there are rumors that director Terrence Malick has been linked to a possible screen adaptation of the novel.
Cultural References
See also
Further reading
External links
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