Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye (Click the character infographic to download.) Oh, Holden. We can’t make up our mind between feeling sorry for him and telling him to just get a grip already. The problem? All he wants to do is connect with someone—anyone—but the boy has high standards. Impossibly high standards. Standards so high that only a precocious fourth-grader can live up to them. It’s tough being a lonely misanthrope. Lost in the Crowd No matter how many times Holden says he’s “lonesome” (it’s a lot), he often can’t even get to the point of reaching out at all. The very first thing the does when he gets off the train in New York is go to a phone booth… and then he leaves twenty minutes later without having even picked up the receiver. We’re going to quote the whole passage, because it’s worth it: as soon as I was inside, I couldn't think of anybody to call up. My brother D.B. was in Hollywood. My kid sister Phoebe goes to bed around nine o'clock— so I couldn't call her up. […] My parents would be the ones [to pick up the phone].

Then I thought of giving Jane Gallagher's mother a buzz, and find out when Jane's vacation started, but I didn't feel like it. Besides, it was pretty late to call up. Then I thought of calling this girl I used to go around with quite frequently, Sally Hayes, because I knew her Christmas vacation had started already—she'd written me this long, phony letter, inviting me over to help her trim the Christmas tree Christmas Eve and all— but I was afraid her mother'd answer the phone. […] Then I thought of calling up this guy that went to the Whooton School when I was there, Carl Luce, but I didn't like him much. So I ended up not calling anybody. I came out of the booth, after about twenty minutes or so. (9.1) Every time Holden thinks of someone to call, he ends up deciding not to—usually because he’s afraid he’ll have to interact with someone he doesn’t like. (Like adults.) On the one hand, this is just Holden’s passivity. Over and over again, he decides not to do something. On the other hand, judging by the interactions that he does have, we… can’t really blame him.

Take a look at just a handful of these encounters: He invites Ackley along to the movies, but Ackley won't return the favor by letting Holden sleep in his roommate's bed. He writes Stradlater's composition for him, and in return gets yelled at (and socked in the nose, but technically that was for different reasons). He even had to type that essay on a junky old typewriter because he had lent his own to the guy down the hall. He lends out up his hound's-tooth jacket, knowing it'll get stretched out in the shoulders. He gets stuck with the tab for the three "moronic" girls' drinks in the Lavender Room at his hotel. He pays Sunny even though he doesn't have sex with her, and ends up getting cheated out of five more dollars (and socked in the stomach, although technically this, too, was for different reasons). Still, Holden never makes himself out to be a victim. He doesn't seem to notice that he gets taken advantage of over and over and over again. At least, not on a conscious level. (We’re not so sure about his unconscious.).

Despite his Judgy McJudgerson exterior, Holden just wants to make friends—like a cute little puppy who keeps on trying. Holden and the Phonies Scratch that: like a cute little puppy with a really bad attitude. Holden may want to make friends, but we’re not sure why: in his mind, everyone is a social-climber, a name-dropper, appearance-obsessed, a secret slob, a private flit (a.k.a gay), or a suck-up. Holden finds any semblance of normal adult life to be "phony." How phony? So phony that he uses the word 33 times—and trust us, that’s a lot of times to use a word like phony. He doesn't want to grow up and get a job and play golf and drink martinis and go to an office, and he certainly doesn't want anything to do with the "bastards" that do. Except that, really, he sort of does. We’re not psychoanalysts but here’s our take: if Holden calls everyone a phony, he can feel better when they reject him.

You know like making fun of the cool kids so it doesn’t hurt when they don’t invite you to their parties. Who cares if the three girls in the Lavender Room weren't terribly interested in giving him the time of day; they were just phonies who couldn't carry on a conversation. Who cares if Ackley doesn't want to let him stay and chat; Ackley's just a pimply moron. Who cares that Stradlater doesn't want to hang out; he's just a jerk. Take just this one incident. At the Lavender Room, when he finally convinces the cute blonde to dance with him, the other two “ nearly had hysterics […] I certainly must've been very hard up to even bother with any of them” (10.13). We have to ask: who’s laughing at whom, here? We have a sneaking suspicion that the girls are the ones having a laugh at Holden’s expense—a scrawny little teenager who can’t even get the bartender to serve him. So, is Holden really an incisive judge of human character who’s too good to be ordinary—or is he just an unlikable, awkward kid with a big chip on his shoulder and a defense mechanism to match?

Let’s Get Physical Right about now, Shmoop is looking around a little self-consciously. (Maybe you are too.) Holden doesn’t sound too different from any other disaffected, bored kid, us included. But there are definite hints in the text that Holden isn't just another normal teenager. For one, we know he had to take some sort of "rest" from regular life to go through therapy and get psychoanalyzed. We know he's prone to violent outbreaks, like breaking all the windows in the garage the night Allie died, or tackling Stradlater after his date with Jane, or screaming at Sally in public (he claims he's not yelling, but she repeatedly asks him to "stop screaming" at her [17.55]). He's flunked out of multiple boarding schools. He's depressed all the time. (By our count, 25 times in the course of the novel.) By the end of the novel, Holden's depression starts to get physical: he's nauseous, he has a headache, he feels dizzy, and he eventually passes out. His comments at the beginning of the novel suggest that his breakdown was in fact physical: he says he "practically got t.b.

and came out here for all these goddam check-ups and stuff" (1.10). So we can pretty sure there's something up with Holden—something more than your average teenage emo kid with Dashboard Confessional posters on his walls. Death to Everyone So, what went wrong? Was Holden just born this way , or can we blame some sort of trauma for his obsession with phonies, morons, and—yep—death? We know that Allie’s death was hugely significant for Holden. We learn about it almost right away, and then Allie pops up over and over again. In fact, when Phoebe asks Holden to name just one thing he likes, the first—and almost only—thing he can think of is Allie (22.36). Less significant (but still pretty awful) is the death of James Castle, the boy who jumped to his death wearing Holden’s turtleneck. But Holden can’t seem to make up his mind about how he feels about death. Sometimes, he seems terrified at the thought of his own death, like when he prays to Allie while crossing the street not to let him disappear.

And then sometimes, he's indifferent and objective to the notion, like when he sits in the freezing cold park after looking for the ducks and wonders what his family would think and what his funeral would be like if he got pneumonia and died. And then there are the times he thinks about suicide, or imagines himself bleeding from a gut wound, or claims that, “If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of [the atomic bomb]. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will” (18.7). Here’s our thought (just roll with us for a minute): we think Holden is a typical teenager in a lot of ways, but we also think he just might be a representation of a post-World War II America—an America that’s dropped the atom bomb and lost its claim to innocence. (Key piece of evidence: Allie dies of leukemia, the disease that many survivors of the atom bomb got.) When Holden gets disgusted with the phonies, he’s disgusted with the idea that anyone can continue to walk around as though the trauma of war and the bomb hasn’t happened, that life can simply continue on.

Let’s Talk About Sex In Chapter 9, Holden looks out of his hotel window into other rooms, where he sees a "distinguished-looking" man prancing about in women's clothes, and a couple squirting water or highballs or something into each other's mouths. Question #1: Why don’t these people close their shades? Question #2: Does Holden see sex as inherently degrading? We have no idea about #1, but we think the answer for #2 is … yes. If you really like a girl, he says, you wouldn't want to "do crumby stuff" to her (9.15), and Holden can think of “very crumby stuff.” In fact, he’s “probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw” (9.15). But we’re not so sure about that. In fact, it seems to us that he feels like he can’t have a sexual relationship with a girl at all, because it would turn her into an object. This means Holden has to either fulfill his sexual urges with girls he doesn't care about, or not fulfill them at all.

Holden's second problem, he says, is that when he's fooling around with a girl and she suggests they stop, he actually … stops. But, somehow, Holden can't find a balance between respecting a woman (and her saying "no") and taking sexual control of a situation where—maybe—the woman wants him to. Maybe Holden has good reason to respect boundaries. After all, he does (maybe) experience a come-on at the hands of his former teacher, and he did (maybe) have "perverty" stuff happen to him "about twenty times since [he] was a kid" (24.94). And Jane either did or did not get molested by her stepfather. (One thing to note—Holden uses “about twenty” a lot to indicate large but indeterminate numbers: “I’ve read the same sentence about twenty times” (3); a record from “about twenty years ago” (16); “about twenty sweaters” (16); “about twenty Indians” (16), and so on. So, “about twenty times” could really mean … one or two.) Why all this ambiguity?

Well, an omniscient, third-person narrator could tell us exactly what’s going on. But that’s not what we have. What we have is Holden, a confused, possibly sex-crazed sixteen year old who admits that he "just [doesn't] understand" sex (9.15). One last thought: could Holden be gay? Is that why he feels confused and alienated? Well, maybe. He does spend a lot of time thinking about Stradlater’s hot bod. He also might read homosexuality where it isn’t, as with Carl Luce or Mr. Antolini. And he's not comfortable with the thought of having sex with a woman. And then there’s his own point that “I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they’re always being perverty when I’m around” (24.82). You know—like maybe they’re picking up on something that Holden can’t even admit to himself? Phonies Lead to Hate; Hate Leads to the Dark Side Holden may not understand himself too well, and he may be troubled, but he does come up with some Yoda-like statements that really knock our socks off.

Examples: • "If somebody knows quite a lot about [the theater and plays and literature], it takes you quite a while to find out whether they’re really stupid or not” (15.2). • "If [girls] like a boy, no matter how big a bastard is, they'll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don't like him, no matter how nice a guy he is […], they'll say he's conceited" (18.1) • "Lots of times you don't know what interests you most till you start talking" (24.24). Now, this isn't exactly Algebra or Ancient Egyptian History, but there's a real emotional intelligence here. Holden understands people: how they think, how they act, and why they do what they do. And he doesn’t like it. In fact, you could even argue that Salinger made Holden too emotionally mature—that a real sixteen-year-old would never have this level of wisdom, even if he thought he did. One other point to make: Holden’s last name is Caulfield. So what? Well, a “caul” is a little piece of membrane that in rare cases covers the head of a newborn.

Babies born with cauls are sometimes said to have supernatural powers, and the caul itself has been traditionally considered good luck. (And also useful protection against drowning, go figure.) So, the “caul” in Caulfield just might indicate that Holden is special—that he has some special insight into people, and that he’s been marked from birth. Maybe Salinger just liked the sound of the word? Well, maybe. But there’s a famous literary character who just so happens to introduce himself in the first person as having been born with a caul: David Copperfield . And guess who name-checks David Copperfield as the very beginning of his own story? Holden Caulfield, who dismisses “all that David Copperfield kind of crap” (1.1). Coincidence? We don’t think so. The Catcher in the Rye Finally, there’s Holden's grand ambition to be…the catcher in the rye. We talk about the irony a in "What's Up With the Title?,” but here’s the deal: Holden's ambitions = impossible. There are just too many "Fuck you" signs in the world. But why does he have this fantasy in the first place? Why is Holden so obsessed with innocence?

Does it have to do with his feelings on and past (bad) experiences with sexuality? Probably. Does it also have to do with the fact that Allie died when he was ten years old? It's highly likely. Is it related to Holden's feelings on adult phoniness, his brewing madness, his emotional intelligence, and his dislike of social constructs? Almost certainly. And, finally, does it have to do with Salinger’s sense of post-World War II America as being a fundamentally corrupt, un-innocent, post-trauma culture? Almost certainly. The 100 best novels: No 72 – The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951) | Books | The Guardian The 100 best novels The 100 best novels: No 72 – The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951) JD Salinger’s study of teenage rebellion remains one of the most controversial and best-loved American novels of the 20th century JD Salinger in New York, November 1952. He was soon to move to Cornish, New Hampshire, where he became ever more reclusive.

Photograph: San Diego Historical Society/Getty Images Share on Messenger Close JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield is to the 20th century what Huckleberry Finn is to the 19th: the unforgettably haunting voice of the adolescent at odds with a troubling world. Holden, the opposite of Huck, is an unhappy rich boy who has done a bunk from his posh secondary school, Pencey Prep, in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. He begins his first-person narrative in words that echo the famous opening of Twain’s novel ( No 23 in this series ), a frank disavowal of “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. Holden declares that he isn’t going to tell us “about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down”. Actually, that’s just what he does, writing (apparently in retrospect from California) about three days in December 1949 when, having been chastised by his school “for not applying myself”, he plays truant over a long and memorable weekend in Manhattan. Holden is tortured by the battle to come to terms with himself, with his little sister Phoebe, and their dead brother Allie.

Like many adolescents, he feels that the world is an alien, hostile and comfortless place run by “phonies”. One of the many remarkable things about Salinger’s portrayal of Holden Caulfield is that he seems to be fully inside the head of this troubled 16-year-old when the author himself was almost twice that age. Salinger had fought in Europe as an infantryman, after landing at Utah Beach on D-day, and later saw action at the Battle of the Bulge. Quite a lot of the downtown action in The Catcher in the Rye (a night out in a fancy hotel; a date with an old girlfriend; an encounter with a prostitute, and a mugging by her pimp) might almost as well describe a young soldier’s nightmare experience of R&R. That’s just one reading. Salinger’s masterpiece (he published comparatively little after its appearance) has also influenced later writers with angry protagonists, from Martin Amis’s Charles Highway to Philip Roth’s Portnoy and many others besides. The Catcher in the Rye remains the crazy, and often very funny, distorting mirror in which generations of British and American teenagers will examine themselves.

At the same time, it instructs them to give nothing away to “the phonies” who ruin all our lives. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything,” says Holden Caulfield, echoing Huck Finn again. “If you do, you start missing everybody.” A note on the text (and its afterlife) The Catcher in the Rye had some difficulty finding a publisher. One editor judged its protagonist simply “crazy”. The New Yorker, which had favoured Salinger’s stories, stalled with indecision. Eventually, it was published on 16 July 1951, by Little, Brown in Boston, with a famous, award-winning cover designed by E Michael Mitchell. Salinger had been working towards his masterpiece, in sketches and drafts, for a decade and more. Some of his earliest short stories, written as a student, contain characters reminiscent of those in The Catcher in the Rye. Indeed, while still at Columbia, Salinger wrote a story, The Young Folks, that included a character described as a prototype of Sally Hayes (Holden’s old flame).

In November 1941, Salinger also sold a story (Slight Rebellion Off Madison), featuring a disaffected teenager with “prewar jitters” named Holden Caulfield, to the New Yorker. After the outbreak of war, in which Salinger served as an infantryman, the piece was considered unpatriotic and did not get published until December 1946. Meanwhile, another story entitled I’m Crazy, containing material that was later used in The Catcher in the Rye, appeared in Collier’s magazine on 22 December 1945. Another long story about Holden Caulfield was accepted by the New Yorker for publication, although it never appeared. The Catcher in the Rye continues to hold its place as the defining novel of teenage angst and alienation. My friend, the critic Adam Gopnik, says it is one of the “three perfect books” in American literature (the others are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby , Nos 23 and 51 in this series). Gopnik says that “no book has ever captured a city better than The Catcher in the Rye captured New York in the 50s”.

Book and author quickly acquired a mystique, partly abetted by Salinger, who cultivated his obscurity to the point of mania, becoming as secretive and self-obsessed as Holden Caulfield, in the words of the New York Times, “the Garbo of letters”. Apart from this novel, Salinger published just one collection of stories and two short books about the Glass family (see below), which some readers prefer. However, between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye became more studied in the high schools and libraries of the United States than any other novel. By 1981, it was the second most taught book in the United States. Teenagers especially loved the book for what is taken as Holden Caulfield’s sponsorship of rebellion, combined with his promotion of drinking, smoking and sex. More seriously, there is the grimmer association of The Catcher in the Rye with the murder of John Lennon by Mark Chapman, and John Hinckley’s failed assassination of Ronald Reagan. Salinger himself remained sequestered from the world in New Hampshire. “There is a marvellous peace in not publishing,” he said, some 20 years after he first fell silent.

Three more from JD Salinger Nine Stories (1953); Franny and Zooey (1961); Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). SparkNotes: The Catcher in the Rye: Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes, Motifs & Symbols The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Alienation as a Form of Self-Protection Throughout the novel, Holden seems to be excluded from and victimized by the world around him. As he says to Mr. Spencer, he feels trapped on “the other side” of life, and he continually attempts to find his way in a world in which he feels he doesn’t belong. As the novel progresses, we begin to perceive that Holden’s alienation is his way of protecting himself. Just as he wears his hunting hat (see “Symbols,” below) to advertise his uniqueness, he uses his isolation as proof that he is better than everyone else around him and therefore above interacting with them. The truth is that interactions with other people usually confuse and overwhelm him, and his cynical sense of superiority serves as a type of self-protection.

Thus, Holden’s alienation is the source of what little stability he has in his life. As readers, we can see that Holden’s alienation is the cause of most of his pain. He never addresses his own emotions directly, nor does he attempt to discover the source of his troubles. He desperately needs human contact and love, but his protective wall of bitterness prevents him from looking for such interaction. Alienation is both the source of Holden’s strength and the source of his problems. For example, his loneliness propels him into his date with Sally Hayes, but his need for isolation causes him to insult her and drive her away. Similarly, he longs for the meaningful connection he once had with Jane Gallagher, but he is too frightened to make any real effort to contact her. He depends upon his alienation, but it destroys him. The Painfulness of Growing Up According to most analyses, The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, a novel about a young character’s growth into maturity. While it is appropriate to discuss the novel in such terms, Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself.

As his thoughts about the Museum of Natural History demonstrate, Holden fears change and is overwhelmed by complexity. He wants everything to be easily understandable and eternally fixed, like the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the museum. He is frightened because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in others, and because he can’t understand everything around him. But he refuses to acknowledge this fear, expressing it only in a few instances—for example, when he talks about sex and admits that “[s]ex is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t” (Chapter 9). Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff.

His created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a protective armor of cynicism. But as the book progresses, Holden’s experiences, particularly his encounters with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the shallowness of his conceptions. The Phoniness of the Adult World “Phoniness,” which is probably the most famous phrase from The Catcher in the Rye, is one of Holden’s favorite concepts. It is his catch-all for describing the superficiality, hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world around him. In Chapter 22, just before he reveals his fantasy of the catcher in the rye, Holden explains that adults are inevitably phonies, and, what’s worse, they can’t see their own phoniness. Phoniness, for Holden, stands as an emblem of everything that’s wrong in the world around him and provides an excuse for him to withdraw into his cynical isolation. Though oversimplified, Holden’s observations are not entirely inaccurate. He can be a highly insightful narrator, and he is very aware of superficial behavior in those around him.

Throughout the novel he encounters many characters who do seem affected, pretentious, or superficial—Sally Hayes, Carl Luce, Maurice and Sunny, and even Mr. Spencer stand out as examples. Some characters, like Maurice and Sunny, are genuinely harmful. But although Holden expends so much energy searching for phoniness in others, he never directly observes his own phoniness. His deceptions are generally pointless and cruel and he notes that he is a compulsive liar. For example, on the train to New York, he perpetrates a mean-spirited and needless prank on Mrs. Morrow. He’d like us to believe that he is a paragon of virtue in a world of phoniness, but that simply isn’t the case. Although he’d like to believe that the world is a simple place, and that virtue and innocence rest on one side of the fence while superficiality and phoniness rest on the other, Holden is his own counterevidence. The world is not as simple as he’d like—and needs—it to be; even he cannot adhere to the same black-and-white standards with which he judges other people.

Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Loneliness Holden’s loneliness, a more concrete manifestation of his alienation problem, is a driving force throughout the book. Most of the novel describes his almost manic quest for companionship as he flits from one meaningless encounter to another. Yet, while his behavior indicates his loneliness, Holden consistently shies away from introspection and thus doesn’t really know why he keeps behaving as he does. Because Holden depends on his isolation to preserve his detachment from the world and to maintain a level of self-protection, he often sabotages his own attempts to end his loneliness. For example, his conversation with Carl Luce and his date with Sally Hayes are made unbearable by his rude behavior. His calls to Jane Gallagher are aborted for a similar reason: to protect his precious and fragile sense of individuality. Loneliness is the emotional manifestation of the alienation Holden experiences; it is both a source of great pain and a source of his security. Relationships, Intimacy, and Sexuality Relationships, intimacy, and sexuality are also recurring motifs relating to the larger theme of alienation.

Both physical and emotional relationships offer Holden opportunity to break out of his isolated shell. They also represent what he fears most about the adult world: complexity, unpredictability, and potential for conflict and change. As he demonstrates at the Museum of Natural History, Holden likes the world to be silent and frozen, predictable and unchanging. As he watches Phoebe sleep, Holden projects his own idealizations of childhood onto her. But in real-world relationships, people talk back, and Phoebe reveals how different her childhood is from Holden’s romanticized notion. Because people are unpredictable, they challenge Holden and force him to question his senses of self-confidence and self-worth. For intricate and unspoken reasons, seemingly stemming from Allie’s death, Holden has trouble dealing with this kind of complexity. As a result, he has isolated himself and fears intimacy. Although he encounters opportunities for both physical and emotional intimacy, he bungles them all, wrapping himself in a psychological armor of critical cynicism and bitterness. Even so, Holden desperately continues searching for new relationships, always undoing himself only at the last moment. Lying and Deception Lying and deception are the most obvious and hurtful elements of the larger category of phoniness.

Holden’s definition of phoniness relies mostly on a kind of self-deception: he seems to reserve the most scorn for people who think that they are something they are not or who refuse to acknowledge their own weaknesses. But lying to others is also a kind of phoniness, a type of deception that indicates insensitivity, callousness, or even cruelty. Of course, Holden himself is guilty of both these crimes. His random and repeated lying highlights his own self-deception—he refuses to acknowledge his own shortcomings and is unwilling to consider how his behavior affects those around him. Through his lying and deception, Holden proves that he is just as guilty of phoniness as the people he criticizes. Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The “Catcher in the Rye” As the source of the book’s title, this symbol merits close inspection.

It first appears in Chapter 16, when a kid Holden admires for walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk is singing the Robert Burns song “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” In Chapter 22, when Phoebe asks Holden what he wants to do with his life, he replies with his image, from the song, of a “catcher in the rye.” Holden imagines a field of rye perched high on a cliff, full of children romping and playing. He says he would like to protect the children from falling off the edge of the cliff by “catching” them if they were on the verge of tumbling over. As Phoebe points out, Holden has misheard the lyric. He thinks the line is “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye,” but the actual lyric is “If a body meet a body, coming through the rye.” The song “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” asks if it is wrong for two people to have a romantic encounter out in the fields, away from the public eye, even if they don’t plan to have a commitment to one another.

It is highly ironic that the word “meet” refers to an encounter that leads to recreational sex, because the word that Holden substitutes—“catch”—takes on the exact opposite meaning in his mind. Holden wants to catch children before they fall out of innocence into knowledge of the adult world, including knowledge of sex. Holden’s Red Hunting Hat The red hunting hat is one of the most recognizable symbols from twentieth-century American literature. It is inseparable from our image of Holden, with good reason: it is a symbol of his uniqueness and individuality. The hat is outlandish, and it shows that Holden desires to be different from everyone around him. At the same time, he is very self-conscious about the hat—he always mentions when he is wearing it, and he often doesn’t wear it if he is going to be around people he knows. The presence of the hat, therefore, mirrors the central conflict in the book: Holden’s need for isolation versus his need for companionship. It is worth noting that the hat’s color, red, is the same as that of Allie’s and Phoebe’s hair. Perhaps Holden associates it with the innocence and purity he believes these characters represent and wears it as a way to connect to them.

He never explicitly comments on the hat’s significance other than to mention its unusual appearance. The Museum of Natural History Holden tells us the symbolic meaning of the museum’s displays: they appeal to him because they are frozen and unchanging. He also mentions that he is troubled by the fact that he has changed every time he returns to them. The museum represents the world Holden wishes he could live in: it’s the world of his “catcher in the rye” fantasy, a world where nothing ever changes, where everything is simple, understandable, and infinite. Holden is terrified by the unpredictable challenges of the world—he hates conflict, he is confused by Allie’s senseless death, and he fears interaction with other people. The Ducks in the Central Park Lagoon Holden’s curiosity about where the ducks go during the winter reveals a genuine, more youthful side to his character. For most of the book, he sounds like a grumpy old man who is angry at the world, but his search for the ducks represents the curiosity of youth and a joyful willingness to encounter the mysteries of the world. It is a memorable moment, because Holden clearly lacks such willingness in other aspects of his life. The ducks and their pond are symbolic in several ways.

Their mysterious perseverance in the face of an inhospitable environment resonates with Holden’s understanding of his own situation. In addition, the ducks prove that some vanishings are only temporary. Traumatized and made acutely aware of the fragility of life by his brother Allie’s death, Holden is terrified by the idea of change and disappearance. The ducks vanish every winter, but they return every spring, thus symbolizing change that isn’t permanent, but cyclical. Finally, the pond itself becomes a minor metaphor for the world as Holden sees it, because it is “partly frozen and partly not frozen.” The pond is in transition between two states, just as Holden is in transition between childhood and adulthood. buzz | By Heba Hasan | July 16, 2012 Today marks the 61st anniversary of J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a novel that introduced us to the most beloved/hated embodiment of disaffected youth in all of literature — and quite possibly pop culture as a whole. To celebrate, we’ve rounded up ten things that Holden Caulfield hates. We could have taken the easy way out and just said all of humanity, but that wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining.

And besides, nothing makes you feel more grateful about the fact that you’re not a self-destructive, angst-ridden teenager (anymore) than reminding yourself exactly why Holden Caulfield loathes Jesus’ Disciples. 1. Bros “He was one of those guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God, I hate that stuff.” Can’t you just picture Holden at a frat party? Sitting on a couch by himself and judging how phony all those guys at the beer pong table are? 2. Women “I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn’t any brains.” OK, so maybe Holden Caulfield doesn’t hate women. Maybe he just hates “stupid girls.” Does that make him a male chauvinist, or is this just one more symptom of being a confused, emotionally inept jerk? 3.

Phoniness “You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were.” Predictable, we know. But no Holden Caulfield hate list would be complete without it. 4. Disciples “I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples.” No elaboration necessary? 5. Movies “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.” Thinks actors are phony, ergo he hates movies. 6. Growing Up “Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

I know that’s impossible, but it’s too bad anyway.” Under all that angst, anger, and self-imposed alienation is just a naïve teenager who wants to save kids from the phoniness of the adult world. 7. Cliques “Everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month club stick together.” The original loner. 8. His Childhood “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.” Because no confused, introspective youth is interesting without a messed-up childhood. 9. Abrupt Endings “I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that.

I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.” Truly sentimental at heart, Holden hates not getting closure. 10. Being Bougie “Everything I had was bourgeois as hell…. At first he only used to be kidding when he called my stuff bourgeois, and I didn’t give a damn — it was sort of funny, in fact. Then, after a while, you could tell he wasn’t kidding any more. Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.” Like any privileged rebel, Holden resents the fact that he comes from a bougie background. He feels that money, like religion, creates social barriers and cliques. Holden Caulfield Holden Caulfield Bookmark this page Manage My Reading List Holden also struggles with family and class expectations. Like Salinger , his socioeconomic background is at least upper-middle class. His family and culture expect him to be reasonably successful at a prestigious prep school and move on to the Ivy League. Holden can't see himself in that role, so he seeks escape, but his plans are spontaneous fantasies that cannot work.

First, he wants to run off with Sally Hayes and maybe get married. This frightens the practical, unimaginative Sally, who is more interested in social status than she is in Holden. Later, Holden decides to flee to the West where he will live as a deaf mute, ideal because he wouldn't have to talk with people. Holden is a romantic but a negative one. His imagined ventures are escapes from reality rather than ascensions toward a goal. The one exception is a beautiful but hopeless dream. When asked by Phoebe what he would like to be, Holden rejects standard choices such as a lawyer or a scientist. He says he would like to be "the catcher in the rye," standing by the edge of a cliff and keeping children, playing in an adjacent field of rye, from falling off. Holden's alienation is disenchantment mingled with hope. He sees ugliness all around him, but he also sees beauty. The 6-year-old boy singing "If a body catch a body coming through the rye" as he marches down the street is, for Holden, a symbol of authenticity and possibility. He feels less depressed as he watches the boy.

The sight of Phoebe on the carrousel is a kind of epiphany (a clarity of insight). It is one of those moments that he would like to keep forever. On the carrousel, there is movement, but the carrousel never actually goes anywhere: just round and round with Phoebe in her blue coat. It is beautiful, and, for a moment, even Holden feels joy. This novel presents a coming-of-age story, but with a twist. The usual pattern in this genre of fiction is for the protagonist to begin in turmoil, struggle toward maturity, face various obstacles that initially defeat him but that he can overcome through virtue and perseverance, and eventually triumph. That is not Holden's story, however. Holden begins in turmoil, struggles in turmoil, has a moment of epiphany watching Phoebe at the carrousel, and eventually suffers physical and emotional collapse. Holden does evolve toward the end of the novel. His acceptance of Phoebe's need to "grab for the gold ring" indicates that he sees her as a maturing individual who must be allowed to live her own life and take her own risks.

At this point, he finally sees that children have to do this, and adults must let them. That's a step forward from believing that he must be their protector. For better or worse, Holden's own maturation has begun. He seems ready to surrender to the inevitability of growing up. He is exhausted, physically and emotionally, ready to go home and collapse. Holden may or may not have progressed enough, learned enough, matured enough at the sanitarium to make it in the future. We can cheer for him, but we can't know what will happen. Salinger does not spoon-feed the reader a "happy" ending, which is all the better for readers of the novel. As Holden says in the final chapter, "I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" SparkNotes: The Catcher in the Rye: Chapters 1–2 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger Chapters 3–4 Summary: Chapter 1 Holden Caulfield writes his story from a rest home to which he has been sent for therapy. He refuses to talk about his early life, mentioning only that his brother D. B. is a Hollywood writer.

He hints that he is bitter because D. B. has sold out to Hollywood, forsaking a career in serious literature for the wealth and fame of the movies. He then begins to tell the story of his breakdown, beginning with his departure from Pencey Prep, a famous school he attended in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Holden’s career at Pencey Prep has been marred by his refusal to apply himself, and after failing four of his five subjects—he passed only English—he has been forbidden to return to the school after the fall term. The Saturday before Christmas vacation begins, Holden stands on Thomsen Hill overlooking the football field, where Pencey plays its annual grudge match against Saxon Hall. Holden has no interest in the game and hadn’t planned to watch it at all. He is the manager of the school’s fencing team and is supposed to be in New York for a meet, but he lost the team’s equipment on the subway, forcing everyone to return early. Holden is full of contempt for the prep school, but he looks for a way to “say goodbye” to it. He fondly remembers throwing a football with friends even after it grew dark outside. Holden walks away from the game to go say goodbye to Mr.

Spencer, a former history teacher who is very old and ill with the flu. He sprints to Spencer’s house, but since he is a heavy smoker, he has to stop to catch his breath at the main gate. At the door, Spencer’s wife greets Holden warmly, and he goes in to see his teacher. Summary: Chapter 2 (See Important Quotations Explained ) Holden greets Mr. Spencer and his wife in a manner that suggests he is close to them. He is put off by his teacher’s rather decrepit condition but seems otherwise to respect him. In his sickroom, Spencer tries to lecture Holden about his academic failures. He confirms Pencey’s headmaster’s assertion that “[l]ife is a game” and tells Holden that he must learn to play by the rules. Although Spencer clearly feels affection for Holden, he bluntly reminds the boy that he flunked him, and even forces him to listen to the terrible essay he handed in about the ancient Egyptians. Finally, Spencer tries to convince Holden to think about his future. Not wanting to be lectured, Holden interrupts Spencer and leaves, returning to his dorm room before dinner.

Analysis: Chapters 1–2 Holden Caulfield is the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, and the most important function of these early chapters is to establish the basics of his personality. From the beginning of the novel, Holden tells his story in a bitterly cynical voice. He refuses to discuss his early life, he says, because he is bored by “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” He gives us a hint that something catastrophic has happened in his life, acknowledging that he writes from a rest home to tell about “this madman stuff” that happened to him around the previous Christmas, but he doesn’t yet go into specifics. The particularities of his story are in keeping with his cynicism and his boredom. He has failed out of school, and he leaves Spencer’s house abruptly because he does not enjoy being confronted by his actions. Beneath the surface of Holden’s tone and behavior runs a more idealistic, emotional current.

He begins the story of his last day at Pencey Prep by telling how he stood at the top of Thomsen Hill, preparing to leave the school and trying to feel “some kind of a good-by.” He visits Spencer in Chapter 2 even though he failed Spencer’s history class, and he seems to respond to Mrs. Spencer’s kindness. What bothers him the most, in these chapters and throughout the book, is the hypocrisy and ugliness around him, which diminish the innocence and beauty of the external world—the unpleasantness of Spencer’s sickroom, for instance, and his hairless legs sticking out of his pajamas. Salinger thus treats his narrator as more than a mere portrait of a cynical postwar rich kid at an impersonal and pressure-filled boarding school. Even in these early chapters, Holden connects with life on a very idealistic level; he seems to feel its flaws so deeply that he tries to shield himself with a veneer of cynicism. The Catcher in the Rye is in many ways a book about the betrayal of innocence by the modern world; despite his bitter tone, Holden is an innocent searching desperately for a way to connect with the world around him that will not cause him pain.

In these early chapters, the reader already begins to sense that Holden is not an entirely reliable narrator and that the reality of his situation is somehow different from the way he describes it. In part this is simply because Holden is a first-person narrator describing his own experiences from his own point of view. Any individual’s point of view, in any novel or story, is necessarily limited. The reader never forgets for a moment who is telling this story, because the tone, grammar, and diction are consistently those of an adolescent—albeit a highly intelligent and expressive one—and every event receives Holden’s distinctive commentary. However, Holden’s narrative contains inconsistencies that make us question what he says. For instance, Holden characterizes Spencer’s behavior throughout as vindictive and mean-spirited, but Spencer’s actions clearly seem to be motivated by concern for Holden’s well-being. Holden seems to be looking for reasons not to listen to Spencer. BBC News - Why does Salinger's Catcher in the Rye still resonate? BBC News Why does Salinger's Catcher in the Rye still resonate?

By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Magazine JD Salinger has consulted his lawyers over an unauthorised "sequel" to his classic novel The Catcher in the Rye. But 58 years after the story about a disaffected teenager was published, why is it still so powerful to so many people? Holden Caulfield does not like a lot of what he encounters. Much is dopey, corny, lousy, crumby, vomity but most of all, phoney. Holden is surrounded by phoneys, almost wherever he goes. It's almost enough to make him puke. FOR AND AGAINST Why people don't like it: Use of 1940s New York vernacular Self-obsessed central character Too much whining Holden is 16. Expelled from his prep school for flunking too many subjects, he travels to New York, his home town. He drinks, smokes, sees a prostitute, is punched by her pimp, goes on a date, has a strange encounter with a former teacher, spends a fair amount of time in the park, and really does not a great deal else.

Mostly he ruminates on the people he meets, people he met in the past and his dead brother. Plot is in short supply. The Catcher in the Rye is a novel where not very much happens. And yet this story of a couple of days in the life of a teenager has sold tens of millions of copies since its release. There are not many other novels from the 1950s that can be found persistently hovering around the top 100 bestseller lists. Rise of teenager Fans of the novel regard it as the defining work on what it is like to be a teenager. Holden is at various times disaffected, disgruntled, alienated, isolated, directionless, and sarcastic. The book's publication in 1951 came at the dawn of the age of the teenager. A new social category, newly economically empowered and hungry for culture, was fed by music, films and novels. William Golding's Lord of the Flies also came propitiously, in 1954. The joy and the shock...

is that he is a rebellious, misunderstood, thoughtful teenager and that is what people love him for - we don't want him stiff-backed and incontinent with grandchildren Katie Allen The Bookseller's review of John David California's 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye "It absolutely speaks to that moment the teenager emerges as a recognisable social group," says Dr Sarah Graham, author of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and a Routledge guide on the same subject. "Before that people went through their teenage years with no sense it was a particular kind of identity. It is the first novel of the modern teenage years." The fact that teenagers were all in high school for the first time, instead of working and providing for their family from an early age, gave them time to think. And to mope. "Leisure gave teenagers time to reflect on where they were going," says Dr Graham, of Leicester University. "The idea of existential angst in some way draws from Catcher in the Rye as much as the novel reflects it.

There is a strong dialogue between the book and the teenage experience - they are mutually shaping." School controversy But The Catcher in the Rye wasn't written for the audience that has embraced it most wholeheartedly. "It was never written for a teenage audience, it was written for adult readers," says Dr Graham. "There's been so much controversy over the years with it being offered to high school students. From the 1950s there are cases of teachers losing their jobs for setting the book." JD SALINGER Lives in Cornish, New Hampshire Not keen on visitors Is thought to have continued writing without intention to publish Whatever the intended audience, Salinger's work has become a classic of one of publishing's most lucrative genres - teen fiction. And a thousand authors have tried to capture the spirit of Holden Caulfield. But despite its gazillions of sales, there are plenty of people - teenage and adult - who just cannot understand what the fuss is about. You can find a decent cross section of these critics giving the book one star on Amazon. "The moaning, dreary I-like-the-sound-of-my-own-voice tone with which Caulfield told his short story started to really get on my nerves," says one.

Another concludes: "It's like reading a diary written by a spoilt, annoying, Emo teenager - self indulgent, repetitive and likely to leave you wanting to just slap the narrator while saying 'for God's sake, get over yourself'." Other brickbats from the iconoclasts include "over-rated", "lamentable", and "inane ramblings". Many of these readers are disappointed that the novel fails to meet the expectations generated by the mystique it is shrouded in. JD Salinger has done his part to enhance this mystique. That is to say, he has done nothing. WORKS INFLUENCED BY CATCHER Novels: Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Judith Guest's Ordinary People Films: The Graduate, Dead Poets Society, Tadpole, Igby Goes Down, Donnie Darko Music: Green Day, The Offspring Source: Dr Sarah Graham Salinger's most famous achievement is writing The Catcher in the Rye, but his second most famous achievement is several decades of seclusion.

He has not published since the 1960s, nor given an interview since the early 1980s. He is a man who only reminds the world of his extant status by occasional forays into legal action against copyright infringers. There can be few works of The Catcher in the Rye's stature that have avoided a Hollywood adaptation. The notoriety of the novel is also enhanced by something far darker - that John Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman was completely obsessed by the work, and was reading it when arrested. Whatever its reputation, Salinger's novel now enjoys a status as something passed from adults to teenagers, and from teenager to teenager. Teenage everyman Adults give it to teenagers hoping they will be reassured that having a train of misanthropic and cynical thoughts parading through their mind is entirely normal, perhaps even desirable. Those who embrace the novel recognize Holden as a teenage everyman. Dr Graham suggests it is unique, "the way in which a young affluent white male has come to stand for a universal experience of adolescence".

He was too much like a goddam general instead of a sad screwed-up type guy Holden Caulfield on Laurence Olivier's take on Hamlet Holden feels uncomfortable about all the things that adults have learnt to inure themselves to. Holden can't bear to see people with cheap luggage - it becomes a symbol of a society where money is all. He hates the school headmaster who will not speak to the funny-looking parents. Holden hates everything that pretends to be authentic. And what do adults re-reading it in 2009 get? Perhaps they hope to recapture something of the way they thought when they were a teenager. A selection of your comments appears below. I read Catcher as 16-year-old in 1976 for O Level. For me, it was part of a great awakening, but that's also down to my teacher, Mike Allen. He told us to read the first chapter - but I gulped down - maybe half or more - of the book, can't remember exactly, in one sitting. I was certainly an emotionally and intellectually suppressed kid, and maybe that's why the book resonated so much with me.

But Catcher and Mike Allen's teaching helped me feel that I did have a brain, and I could use it, so I owe them both a lot. I tried reading it again and it just didn't click the way it did that first time. Maybe it is overrated - but Salinger's use of skaz is certainly adept and Holden is a great anti-hero character, so the book keeps on working. Dave, Cambridge The REAL issue is that this, like many other books, has been over analysed, attributed with 'hidden' meanings, compared and judged, and assigned values by a diverse range of people. It has become a myth rather than what it actually is; a well written, well structured story. A story does not have to have a lot happen in it, nor does it have to be interesting. A story is something that should be read rather than interpreted or compared with other, unrelated, things. James, Spain Got to the end of it and thought I'd missed something, some piece of subtext or hint that something else was going on but being cleverly concealed. Then realised it was completely straightforward. Absolutely baffled as to why some people rate it so highly.

Dave, Edinburgh Read it for first time a few years back - I was in my 60s. Read it because my wife read it and moaned at every page because she didn't like the narrator. So I read it to see what the fuss was about. At first I hated it because the "hero" is so unlikeable. But then I realized that he knew that he wasn't really important to his parents. They gave him affluence but not love. But the title says it all - the core of the book is his daydream about being the catcher in the rye, and saving his young brother. Joe, Glasgow Lets face it, the people who don't get the Catcher are lucky as they have managed to go through life without having cause to feel dejected and isolated enough to experience the emotions that this book encapsulates. Be sure, though that there is a significant majority for who this book resonates greatly, and these people are probably not the kind to browse the BBC magazine section to alleviate the boredom of 9-5 at Barclays. I can see the book losing relevance in the "modern" world where clamouring for an extra Facebook friend is as close to an existensial crisis as most people get.

Yeknas , Kilchoan, Scotland Having just finished studying the novel for my GCSEs, I must say that I absolutely love it! Although I initially hated the book, I found it dull and uneventful, I grew to love it through the in-depth analysis we did in class. I think Holden is an incredibly interesting character and it gives an amazing insight into the mind of a troubled teenager, oppressed by society. It is now one of my favourite books. Christina M, London Possibly the most overrated book of all time Grahame, Newport The point of literature of this nature is to provoke thought. It's like all character studies, complex. If you want a good story, or need entertaining read pulp. If you want a commentary on the human condition then in Catcher there is no better. This is the text that defines the 20th century along with Ulysses, and will be a point of reference for ages to come when they look back on history of what went wrong in society. For those "not getting it" and who have posted negativity- there is a strong link between your inane babble and the point of the book.

Stu Pittars, London We studied this and Paul Zindel's The Pigman at school. Both were brilliant and completely captivated the class, even those not usually interested in literature. Why? Because both deal directly with the issues that most teenagers encounter. Sharon Frances, Glasgow The book really speaks to the confused outsiders that are Holden-like in their thoughts and behaviour.I think the people that don't "get it" are simply to well-adjusted. Also, I'm surprised they haven't mentioned Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" as being influenced by Catcher, it is the most obvious example i would have thought. Colin Mackay, Edinburgh I can't believe people being disappointed in the work because they find the central character unsympathetic. You're not SUPPOSED to like him, he's not in a popularity contest. Many great works of art are supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. One of the few books everyone seems to have read, and that says a lot.

David Blake, London I actually read this in 1980, I was 16, I read it because Mark Chapman was reading it and said it inspired him to kill John Lennon, I found the book in the attic last year and read it again even at 43. I still can't make the connection. The book was as boring last year as it was in 1980 Mrs Sutherland, Glasgow The first time I read 'Catcher in the Rye' I hated it. I was 17 at the time and growing up in a former pit village in the north of England. I couldn't understand why someone so privileged and with so much opportunity could be so miserable. I avoided reading it for many years. I read it maybe 10 years later and I can now class it as one of my favourites. In my opinion there's a certain irony to the work that I only understood after a certain amount of experience. I think the text is a work of genius. Andy Feast, Manchester, UK I read Catcher simply to see what all the fuss was about like the vast majority of others who have read it I would imagine.

Frankly I really don't know what all the fuss was about.....a work of it's time seen as subversive and so gaining a reputation like any forbidden fruit. Written today it would be unlikely to even get published. Trevor, Nantwich I bought the book a while ago when it was hyped on a best seller programme. I have attempted to read it for the second time, and, I must tell you I am not enjoying it. Although I am a young 45 I just can't get into the flow of the book, the narrator bores me rigid, do I need to have gone through the American education system to understand any of it? It is not a book to read if you are at all suicidal, as it may push you over the edge. A Russell, Stratford-upon-Avon I apologise for using this hackneyed example, but I have to say it: it's timeless in a similar way to Shakespeare, and the use of vernacular shouldn't cloud the same thoughts and ideals we in our current day face. In fact, it helps us accept that the base of human nature is essentially the same no matter where it is dated, and this is of fear.

Fear of the unknown, of the eventuality of death (sorry for being morbid). When we are young, we are made to believe that adults know everything. We mess up, they clean up after us, they teach us what is right and what is wrong. We finally realise upon reaching adulthood that the people making rules are as scared as we are. This fear can translate to what he calls being a "phoney", changing your behaviour around others because everything is not black and white anymore. Maybe Holden dost protest too much, but as a teenager who realises this veneer of calm around him melt around the edges for the first time, I don't blame him. He wants to save youth from us, just like we had it stolen from him. That's life I'm afraid, and we like reading about life. Life sells. Susan Gray, Harrow, London I'm 35 and read this for the first time earlier this year. I picked it up as it was small, fit in my rucksack and I was travelling. The Catcher In The Rye was tortuous.

I would agree with two of the "Why people don't like it" points in the original article - too much whining and a self-obsessed central character. I'd also add that virtually nothing actually happens. There's no plot, no story. It's outdated, but even its age can't hide how dull it is. Picking JD Salinger over, say, Anthony Horowitz is like picking Forrest Gump over The Shawshank Redemption. Iain Purdie, Perth, UK There weren't any teenagers before Holden Caulfield. There certainly weren't any at Pencey anyway, just crumby overgrown kids who grin too much. Harry Bristol, Bristol The moment I started to read it I was enamoured. Holden struck me as really funny for some reason but I really related to him as well. I thought of high school as a waste of my time. I felt like everyone around me considered social status to be the most important part of their lives. Everyone was essentially being "phoney" in order to achieve a higher rank among their peers - drinking and doing drugs even if they didn't particularly want to etc.

A lot of old friends ditched everything they ever were to be accepted by a bunch of people who had done the same, yielding to an imaginary pressure. It took every ounce of my tolerance to even show up every day and stand up to the nonsense. It was Holden's other experiences and sensitivity that in the end made me really depressed. I read the book twice but realized it was bad for my mental health. Holden was funny and interesting but also wasn't proactive enough. I realized that in order to bear all of the things that drive us mad about the "phonies" one must take initiative to do things that make one happy and stop thinking so much about other people and what they do and think.... I'll always think it was a good book though and it was a relief to think for a moment during adolescence that I wasn't completely alone in my misery. Jessica, Providence, USA Never read it, not interested in reading it either. If I want to hear a teenager moan, I ask my son to do the washing up! Andie, UK I just didn't get it. I read it in my late 20s and just got very annoyed with Holden.

If I remember correctly, I kept comparing it with Mrs Dalloway, which, funnily enough, I got completely. Why? I don't know - it just seems to chime. Maybe it's time to look at it again in my late 30s - I may be a little more forgiving of teenage angst instead of getting annoyed. Maybe it's time to read Mrs Dalloway again and see if I've got rose-tinted lenses on. Janet, Newcastle upon Tyne

Question: What does 'Holden Caulfield' say he will be, in the title of a famous novel?
Answer: 'THE CATCHER IN THE RYE'