‘The Catcher in the Rye’: A Portrait of Disillusionment
A review of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, by J.D. Salinger; Little, Brown and Company, 1951.
Holden Caulfield has become an icon of teenage rebellion. He is cynical, wounded and—depending on who you ask—perspicacious or petulant and lacking in a sense of proportion. This is plain to see from his opening words, which frame him as world-weary beyond his years, hurt, and unwilling to play by the rule of his society or, as the case may be, of memoir:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Holden, it turns out, has just been expelled from Pencey, a boarding school in Pennsylvania, for failing all his classes save for English. But he claims he doesn’t care, because there, at Pencey, ‘all the phonies’ thrive (‘phony’ is a favourite Caulfieldism). He had just received an unwanted lecture from Mr. Spencer, the history teacher, who even read aloud Holden’s terrible exam answer. Holden, who resented Spencer’s patronising tone, left of his own volition.
Holden, it turns out, has just been expelled from Pencey.
Unwilling to face his parents’ wrath—his expulsion is only his latest failure—Holden heads to New York and checks into a cheap hotel. What follows are a string of pointless encounters. As he makes his way back home, he meets various people, but every action ends in irritation and every attempt to connect turns into disappointment. But the story is much less about what happens in the outside world than what happens inside Holden’s head. Holden has a deeply pessimistic worldview and is profoundly egocentric. He longs for intimacy but his view of other people veers between idealised and hypercritical.
Much ink has been spilt attempting to understand Holden Caulfield, who is the essence of The Catcher in the Rye. Chiefly the book deals with disillusionment. Holden sees the world as inhabited by phonies—adults who have shed the sincerity of youth for the pursuit of money, power and other shallow pleasures. Holden, who at seventeen is on the cusp of adulthood, clings to his childhood, which he sees as a lost Eden; but the novel subtly suggests that even children must make compromises. Holden is far from free of hypocrisy. He condemns what he does: lying, wasting money, and sheering at others while craving their approval. Both his pain and self-pity are real. But that pain is largely self-caused. He wants the world to be otherwise but cannot make it so, and resists ascending to an age at which he might have a say in reshaping it.
Holden sees the world as inhabited by phonies — adults who have shed the sincerity of youth.
Predictably some have sought to slap a label on Holden Caulfield and ‘explain’ his behaviour (and, in my view, rid the book of some of the ambiguity that makes it interesting). I am a bit suspicious of labels (per Kierkegaard: ‘One you label me, you negate me’) and receptive to a view espoused by the British Psychological Society, which said some years ago that ‘mental illness’ was invalid and ought to be replaced by ‘mental distress’: medicalised language often creates a false distance between a person’s feelings and the cause of his distress. Still, Holden has been ‘diagnosed’ with depression by some, narcissism by others. There are other, intriguing takes of Holden’s peculiar psychology, but to go into them would entail giving too many of the story away.
We can say that The Catcher in the Rye subverts the bildungsroman or ‘coming-of-age’ novel, in which a young person leaves behind their youth and enters adulthood. Holden is poised between childhood and maturity, which his reflected in the way he talks: veering between bravado and despair, cynicism and the desire to connect. But he does not want to grow up. More still, he seems deeply distrustful of adults. Despite his profound self-absorption—Holden seems to project many of his flaws onto others—he sees adults as self-involved to the point of being unredeemable. Children, in contrast, are innocent, kind, spontaneous and generous. Yet he, being caught between these two worlds, is both, and neither.
Holden is poised between childhood and maturity.
Thus, Holden would seem to be suffering from what we would now call an identity crisis. He cannot reconcile the different sides of himself. And this we can connect to the America in which Salinger was writing. For that country had just emerged from a long and brutal and tiring war and had settled for the false security of mass conformity. America was on the winning side of the Second World War; more still, it got rich off the back of it and was emerging as the world’s most powerful nation. But that war had left a great wound. For Salinger, humanity had lost. And only the younger generation saw that the American Dream was hollow, that beneath the apparent stability were deep psychological tensions. People put getting and spending above authentic expression and were living shadow lives—lives that were emotionally and spiritually bankrupt.
It is helpful to have a coherent sense of self, as any psychologist will tell you, but it is just as important to learn to live with ambiguity, and it is this with which Holden struggles. To live among others, to live with ourselves, to come to terms with our perceived contradictions and still move forward, we have to recognise that the answers we seek are not forthcoming.
