And that's ok! He's reacting to things terribly and he's cocky and manipulative and it comes all as a defense from dealing with this pain.
Kids are so often neglected and their pain isn't taken as seriously and Holden, someone so hurt but still so full of love, isn't normally a protagonist. And it's not because of pity that I liked this book and him, it's because reading about a kid whose trauma is respected enough to be written about was beautiful. It isn't until he is expelled that he can begin to deal with his trauma, likely because he was also being abused at school. This book is 72 hours of the stages of grief. Trauma doesn't leave, and he figures that out as the story progresses. He thinks pretending to be like all of these grown-ups that, from his eyes, deal with their pain so calmly and apathetically that the pain will soon deal with him in that way too. Holden is going through trauma and coping with it in a way we could only expect from a child. Salinger is a fantastic writer, and I love this book because I love this story. God this book.This is a tricky one because I feel like this book has been associated with so much machismo and just like intolerance of woman that as a woman (woman?) I feel so fucking weird saying that this is one of my favorite books. Though, I do wonder why it is called Catcher in the Rye? ( ) It is still not going to be my favorite, but it made me give it another star. And I think I get more what the novel is trying to accomplish after hearing him talk about it. I get that Holden is lonely, I definitely have been where he had been, lost, unsure, alone, and wanting someone to talk to, I get that. It made me appreciate the book a bit more. I'm glad I read it, and I appreciate it for what it was, but I doubt I will read it again, and I can't understand why people like it so much.Įdit: I watched John Green (author of Looking For Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, and vlogbrothers on youtube) do a sort of review on youtube about the novel.
Now though, it just seems a bit dull to me. It was something that probably wasn't the norm at that time. That aside, I get why this was regarded as good when it was published. He moped around, went to NY, moped around some more, etc. He is an annoying, whiny, little shit who needs to grow up. The way he called everyone 'old' pissed me off beyond belief, people he didn't know, it was just annoying.
And I have to say, he strikes me as one of the phony people he so despises. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep"-Jacket. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices - but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. "The hero-narrator of 'The Catcher in the Rye' is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City.