Holden Caulfield

Since Salinger died, I figure I'd read Catcher. Especially since I had neglected to the first time around.

All in all I liked it. It was really well written. Salinger captured the mind of a messed up teenager perfectly.

He did it in two ways: his prose was whiny, obnoxious, grammatically incorrect and filled with slang. I thought it was great to read but a lot of my friends knock the book because the prose is too whiny. To them I say that's the point. It wasn't that Salinger wrote that way, it was Salinger writing like a whiny kid. So really, A+ for Salinger if my friends think it's too whiny.

Second way: almost everything Holden does is a contradiction. He wants to be the "Catcher in the Rye" and stop little kids from becoming adults, but he also wants to hang out in bars, drink, smoke cigarettes and other adult activities. He calls everyone he meets a "phony" but is incredibly fake to most people he talks to. He rarely says what he wants to. He is, in essence, a phony. The last few sentence of the book are even, "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you'll start missing people." That pretty much means don't be genuine, if you're genuine, you'll regret what you've done.

So with that I say Holden is in no way the voice of teenagers everywhere. He doesn't represent adolescence. He represents a confused, sad, lost individual; someone limited by their own pretenses. To say that that represents adolescence doesn't give adolescence enough credit. He's a great character, but is not the voice of an age group. I don't think that's what Salinger intended him to be, and I don't think that's how it should be taught to high schoolers.

Im glad I didn't pay attention junior year, but I'm glad I read the book.