
Get a Life, Holden Caulfield - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/weekinreview/21schuessler.html?ref=books
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zimbabwe
It's depressing to see Catcher In The Rye continually misinterpreted.
Salinger's fault for being so obscure, perhaps, but I blame English teachers
for not explaining the book well.

The "Catcher In The Rye" is a snippet Holden Caulfield _mishears_ from a poem
about two children growing up and having sex. He thinks it's about catching
children who are falling out of the field, protecting people from growing up,
when in fact it's the opposite. His sister points this out to him when he
takes her from their home.

The point of Catcher is that Holden is _wrong_. He thinks he's being bold and
brave and telling the truth and rebelling, when in fact he's too young to know
anything. The moral is supposed to be that we all make mistakes and think
we're the heroes, but that eventually we all grow up.

But that's not taught anymore, so instead we have a bunch of whiny kids
idolizing that book and a bunch of people who ought to appreciate it all
thinking it's whiny. Salinger's better than he's given credit for. Again I
blame schools.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Your right, my teacher didn't tell us this interpretation in my school. The
book makes more sense now.

~~~
micks56
I will add another interpretation from my HS English teacher: whether anything
in the book actually happened.

Read the first page: "Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam [sic]
autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that
happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had
to come out here and take it easy."

Holden is in a mental hospital. This is confirmed on the last page [approx.]
of the book.

"I could probably tell you what I did after I went home, and how I got sick
and all, and what school I'm supposed to go to next fall, after I get out of
here."

From that, Holden is in the hospital. The last line of the book says, "Don't
ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

From what I remember, this means that Holden made up all of those stories. His
family realized he was crazy because they know none of those things actually
happened, put him in the hospital, and now he doesn't get to see his family or
friends very often.

~~~
zimbabwe
The mental hospital I can see - I've heard that before - but I don't know if
I'd go from that to saying it was all fictitious. It seems too detailed to be
fiction, and it never slips up and reveals itself to be potentially phony.
(That raises the fun postmodern question of this being a story-within-a-story,
but I don't think that was Salinger's intent at all.)

Of course, the fun thing about fiction that also doesn't get said enough is
that the debating over what happened is part of the fun. I had one teacher who
would present these analyses like they were hard fact, when in reality the
only fact is what the author gives you, and the analyses can be debated with
that in mind.

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neilk
Holden Caulfield is an Establishment figure's idea of a rebellious youth.
Privileged life, no real problems, whiny about small hypocrisies, ambivalent
about sex, and deep down he wishes to return to innocence.

This has become the acceptable image of youthful discontent, the one that
educational institutions prescribe for their students.

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misuba
The kids who show up in this article are framed to sound callow and shallow.
I'm suspicious. I want to hear more from them directly.

What does it say about the author of this piece, and her generation, that she
seems to think teens (and the rest of us) should want to be miserable? Hell, I
can't prove that we shouldn't, but that's no reason to assume it.

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Tichy
"Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and hyperactive pop
culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry
Potter"

What a completely random sentence.

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indraneel24
I just read this book for the first time, in my American Literature class, and
as my fellow peers read it, I heard them remark that Holden was "annoying and
whiny."

Personally, having looked up a lot of the symbolism in the novel on my own, I
truly enjoy <em>Catcher</em> and all the life lessons it teaches. I, at times,
related to Holden, even through all his inconsistencies and flaws. It's an
excellent book and I hope teachers understand how to teach it better at their
"work"shops.

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zandorg
Reading it depressed me because he was having such a good time.

The film (and moreso, the book) Wonderboys I think depicts young academia
brilliantly, much better than Catcher. It has the crazy mentor (which I also
had) which Catcher lacks.

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100k
Having read Catcher in the Rye later in life (in my 20s rather than as a
teenager) and rather enjoying it, I find this interesting.

I do think the millennials are more integrated into society than the Gen Xers
or earlier Gen Ys who were more interested in rebelling. It will be
interesting to see how this plays out as the millennials come of age.

~~~
zitterbewegung
As a millennial (born 1988) I enjoyed the book but I was unhappy that we
couldn't finish the book in class for some reason (time constraints?). I want
to rebel against some of my parents values but I am primarily more concerned
about getting a college degree and integrating into society.

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jdp
Did teachers in the 1950's feel the same way about Caulfield as teachers feel
now about Potter? I'm sure they did, and I'm just as sure that in 2050 Potter
will be just as dated children will have just as much trouble relating.

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rnernento
Kind of depressing... If we're replacing Holden Caulfield with Harry Potter
I'm worried.

~~~
zimbabwe
I'd be worried if Harry Potter was _replacing_ Holden, but the two can stand
proudly side-by-side. The alienation in Harry Potter may not be as
overwhelming as it is in Catcher, but it's probably even more pervasive in how
it illustrates the world as a relatively amoral place where few people care
about others for the sake of caring. The Goblet of Fire marked a moment when a
whole generation of kids suddenly got a lot older.

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DannoHung
(Disclaimer: I haven't read Catcher) Maybe this is just the inevitable phase
change for Catcher in the Rye, from beloved literature to stodgy bullcrap your
English teacher thinks is awesome. I mean, I'm sure people loved Ethan Frome
and Wuthering Heights at some point, but I just think they're miserable books
about miserable people being miserable to each other and, subsequently, making
the entire world more miserable.

Which is not to say that I find all classic literature terrible. Just some of
it.

