In honor (or perhaps dishonor) of Salinger, I am posting an essay I wrote a number of years ago. 2004 to be exact. It’s a bit lengthy for a blog post, so it’s behind the cut. Yikes it is PAINFUL to read things you wrote 6 years ago, and actually SUBMITTED for a grade.

Holden Caulfield is the character every angsty teenage boy wants to be and every lonely teenager girl wants to date. Jonathan Yardley refers to the novel in which he stars as “an essential document of American adolescence – the novel that every high school English teacher reflexively puts on every summer reading list.” Aware of its reputation, I was eager to read Catching in the Rye when it was assigned to my sophomore English class. As a sarcastic, know-it-all fifteen year old I couldn’t wait to see Holden stylishly denounce the phonies. I expected Salinger’s novel to give insight into the mind of a wise beyond his years boy, and explain to the world of popular teenagers – the world I despised – what it was like to feel misunderstood and lonely.

Yet, as I slogged through Salinger’s mawkish prose, I had a difficult time figuring out what all the excitement was about. Despite having been told innumerable times that I would identify with Holden, I couldn’t help disliking him. He was quick to label people phonies, but he lied constantly, especially to himself. I became impatient with his poor treatment of everyone he encountered. When I reached the end I was disappointed and uninspired. But, everyone else in my English class loved it – and it is a rarity in high school for students to enjoy the assigned reading. I was convinced I must have been missing something.  Certainly, there must be something to Holden besides his whining and inability to take responsibility for his own actions. Maybe there was something that justified his behavior.

I listened to the class discussion in which student after student expressed how “cool” Holden was. They felt sorry for him; he was so sad! They admired the way he cursed humanity and dismissed those around him as phonies. It’s great they said, to have a character who comes out and “tells it like it is.” I kept quiet. Maybe I was wrong to think Holden was a phony. Everyone else seemed to have sympathy for him, and some were even excited that they had finally found a character who expressed how they felt. I must have been missing something. So I answered the assigned study questions, wrote what I identified with in the text and moved on.

A year later I met a boy who proudly declared that he was exactly like Holden Caulfield. “I’m writing my junior English paper on Salinger,” he informed me excitedly. “Don’t you just love Catcher in the Rye?” I was trying to get a date there, so I smiled, nodded, and within a few weeks, I was his girlfriend. The next year, Catcher in the Rye was listed in my senior yearbook as one of “Our Top Three Favorite Books.” I never admitted that I, the girl voted most sarcastic by the senior class, could not identify with the quintessential character of cynicism. It seemed that I should like Holden. I had certainly spent a good portion of high school as misanthropic outsider. I had a bad habit of judgmentally dismissing the seemingly superficial behavior of my peers. Besides, there must be something wrong with me if I couldn’t muster up sympathy for a poor guy who was just trying to deal with his brother’s death.  Why didn’t I like Holden? I had wanted to like Catcher in the Rye. Holden and I both had a lot of angst, so why didn’t I hit it off with him? It seemed everyone else had. The novel that was supposed to speak to my typical teenage insecurity had the effect of making me very insecure in my unpopular opinion.

David Rachels writes that high school English is indoctrination, that encourages independent thinking by “letting students explain why he or she accepted someone else’s view on the subject.” Instead of debating whether Holden is a good human being, it is already accepted that he is the victim of circumstances. He is universally seen as hardened to the world; sad and broken. Thus his behavior is accepted, excused, and admired.  He’s seen as heroic for the way he rails against the world and honestly assesses humanity. He’s labeled tragic for being punished by a world that can’t possibly understand him. It is demanded that one sympathize with his plight; to think otherwise about Holden would be insensitive. The only choice that was placed before my sophomore honors English class was whether Holden was a static or dynamic character. Is he able to recover from his depression? Or is he still in the same state he was at the beginning of the book? Acceptance of Holden as a tragic hero is a foregone conclusion. Questions about whether we even liked Holden were never raised. It was already assumed that every high school sophomore would be eager to sing his praises.

Holden isn’t necessarily a horrible person. He’s a seventeen year old who made some bad decisions and isn’t happy with his life.  Everyone has felt alone and misunderstood, and seen their circumstances as unfair. It’s practically a requirement of adolescence to occasionally hate the world around you. But one of the lessons one learns again and again is that you have to take responsibility for your actions. Holden never does this. Students seem to admire that, after being kicked out of school, Holden fearlessly roams New York City, having adventure after adventure. Everyone skips over the fact that Holden was kicked out of school for a reason – it was his fault and it seems he was given a number of second chances. He didn’t take them. Holden chooses not to take advantage of the opportunities bestowed upon him, and then he blames the school, the world, and those “damn phonies.” After page upon page of unsubstantiated whining, I couldn’t trust Holden’s view of the world.

Holden, like a lot of teenagers, thinks that everyone is out to get him. He’s not a very nice person. He’s selfish. He’s whiny. He’s a typical teenager who thinks he knows everything and needs to grow up. Jonathan Yardley writers that Salinger’s mediocre novel is “required reading as therapy, a way to encourage young people to bathe in the warm, soothing waters of resentment (all grown-ups are phonies) and self-pity without having to think a lucid thought.” Many of us are embarrassed by an honest look back at our adolescence because we all acted like immature brats at some point, and must often sheepishly admit that our parents might have been right about a couple of things. Thus, the admiration teenagers have for Holden seems misplaced. No one should aspire to stay seventeen forever.

Salinger’s novel appeals to the insecurity many teenagers are overwhelmed by and makes them proud of their whiny rebellion. Holden has been canonized as the patron saint of adolescent angst by kids who admire him because he’s “just like them..”  Unfortunately, no one ever stops to ask if this was a good thing. It is only now, high school four years behind me, that I can say that I wasn’t missing anything back in sophomore honors English.  Hopefully all the boys who declare themselves the Holden Caulfield of their high school grow out of it and all the girls who want to date a Holden Caulfield realize that they’d be better off with someone who isn’t so callow. I still have a lot of growing up to do, but I like to think I’m past the stage of blaming the world for any misfortune I encounter. The world according to Holden is an unfair place, and he is unwilling to accept that. Growing up means accepting the world isn’t always fair. And that quite often, you’ll have to deal with phonies like Holden.