Catcher in the Rye

I had never read Catcher in the Rye before this class. I knew that it was not a favorite of most people, but that my mom loved it. Mixed reviews are always confusing so I wasn't sure what to expect. I, however, loved it!

On the first day that we discussed the book I was only on page 25 so I wasn't quite ready to talk about anything yet. It was, however, interesting to hear people's interpretations of Holden and then keep those in mind as I read the rest of the novel.

On our first day of discussion for Catcher, people used these words to characterize Holden: angry, depressed, confused, angst ridden, misdirected, smart, fabricator. Yet as I was reading, the character I saw was more sympathetic than that. He is certainly confused and he does make things up, but I think that he is genuinely sympathetic and kind. The scene with the nuns stands out to me most. He gives them his money because he knows that they will put it to better use than he will, and, as he says after the nuns depart, he really enjoyed talking to them. He has a good heart. He cares what others think of him. If he were just out to be a jerk I don't think that the character would be as interesting. Also, he's quite a lot more sensitive to women than the other men in the novel. He explains that he stops when a girl asks him too while most guys continue on. He has a conscious that most others don't and he's really honest with himself. I like him.

In the section where he looks for his sister at the Museum I thought it was interesting that he went into so much detail about his experiences there in the past. I think that his love of the Museum stemmed from the fact that nothing changed there. Salinger writes, "The best thing...in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish...the only thing that would be different would be you." I think that Holden has had to deal with a lot of changes in his life and that he would have maybe preferred more stability. It's difficult enough to be an adolescent but to be that age and having to move away from your home and shipped from school to school is even worse. His parents don't seem to be the most concerned people on the planet either. Why do they insist on prep school? Why not keep him in NYC?

Holden ponders religion a lot and I love his discussion of forgiveness on page 100. It's just after he's talked with the prostitute and I think he's feeling weird. He knew that having sex with her would have been a bad choice but I think he still feels guilty about it. He explains that Jesus would never have sent Judas to Hell and although it isn't directly said, I think that he is thinking about how he can forgive himself and how he hopes that his family will forgive him for his occasional screw-ups. His sensitivity makes me really feel for him. He wants to be a good guy and I think that he genuinely is. I wonder what happens between the time at the zoo and his committal to the mental institution. Also, the scene with Mr. Antolini is weird. Did that happen? Was it a hallucination or just him misconstruing a kind gesture as a sexual advance?

Those last two pages are so sad. He's so lonely. I think that his last lines are interesting. He says, "I sort of miss everybody I told about...Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." It seems that to him, the act of telling, putting the experience and the person into language, takes something away from the teller. I'm not quite sure what to make of it all. Maybe just that telling is always an acto of remembering and therefore it is always removed from the original place and people. The recollection makes one's distance from it all that more hard to bear. That's how I used to feel about missing Alaska in my first year here. When I wasn't thinking about it, I didn't miss it. But when I told stories or looked at pictures, I was sad. Hmmm...