This is my extended essay (English A1, Higher Level) in the IB programme. I got an A (As a matter of fact, this is the only thing in the IB that I am truly proud of).
“People always clap for the wrong things”
A closer look at the themes in J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” behind the setting of teenage rebellion
Hai Di Dac Nguyen (3966 words)
Abstract
This essay attempts to challenge the common interpretation of “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger as a book of teenage angst, by showing another way of looking at it and perceiving it.
Holden Caulfield seems like a troubled teenage boy who does not want to grow up and detests the corrupt world of phony adults. He seems like a confused adolescent who does not fit in the society, does not belong anywhere and does not know where to go. He seems like a pitiful loser who cannot get along with people and always gets rejected. He seems like a cynical and irritable young person who makes negative comments on everyone and everything, and yet, lacks courage to say it. But that is merely the surface. This essay touches on some other works by J. D. Salinger, emphasizing on the parallels between Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass, another well-known character he created. Knowing about Seymour Glass and seeing the striking similarities between the two helps seeing “The Catcher in the Rye” in a new light. This essay, in short, analyzes Holden’s thoughts and actions, and thus, by the character analysis, argues for another meaning, another message of this novel, or at least, gives another interpretation. There are people who say “The Catcher in the Rye” became well-known because it was born in the time of no adolescent culture, which is something today’s teenagers cannot fully comprehend and they therefore cannot really find themselves in him, understand his emotions, thoughts and actions. But it seems that J. D. Salinger never meant it to be a portrayal of a typical teenager standing in confusion and fear between the children’s world and the adults’ world, but merely used this setting to tackle a more profound issue.
“People always clap for the wrong things”- A closer look at the themes in J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” behind the setting of teenage rebellion
Introduction
As a book that is very often included in the lists of 100 best books of all time, “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger is commonly said to have the main theme of teen angst. It is seen as a portrayal of a teenage rebel in a society of no adolescent culture, where there is nothing between childhood and adulthood. But is it really a novel of adolescent angst, or, despite the common interpretation, something more than that?
On Google, if you type “The Catcher in the Rye, teen angst”, there are about 21,500 results in 0.27 seconds; “The Catcher in the Rye, teenage rebellion”- 154,000 results in 0.32 seconds; “The Catcher in the Rye, teenagers”- 923,000 results in 0.4 seconds. On Wikipedia, it is introduced to have “themes of teenage confusion, angst, alienation, language and rebellion”. [1]
In the article “J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly” on Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrote “The Catcher in the Rye was already well on the way to the status it has long enjoyed as an essential document of American adolescence” [2], and “The Catcher in the Rye created adolescence as we know it, a condition that barely existed until J. D. Salinger created it.” [3] A person who signed as Saammm on bukisa.com wrote “The root of his depression can mainly be found in his desire to never grow up”[4], and “Holden possibly sees this as a way he can help the younger generation to never grow up and be “phonies” like the adults he encounters and his peers” [5]. On National Public Radio (npr.org), on 28/1/2010, Neal Conan said “That novel tucked into backpacks and lovingly thumbed since its release in 1951 gave voice to adolescent despair, and despite its age, never feels dated” [6], and something similar had already been said on 20/1/2008, “Holden Caulfield […] had given voice to generations of teenagers caught between childhood and the adult world”.[7]
At the end of chapter 22 of the book, in the conversation with his little sister Phoebe, Holden said “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around- nobody big, I mean- except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.” [8]This is commonly interpreted that Holden wants to save the pure, honest, innocent children from entering the corrupt world of adults while he is the one that must be saved, the one that needs help and eventually, somehow gets help from Phoebe.
However, there is a dilemma here. Jonathan Yardley wrote “Viewed from the vantage point of half a century, the novel raises more questions than it answers. Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools?” [9]
Jennifer Schuessler, in “Get a Life, Holden” on The New York Times, in contrast, wrote “The Catcher in the Rye […] is still a staple of high school curriculum, beloved by many teachers who read and reread it in their own youth. The trouble is today’s teenagers. Teachers say young readers just don’t like Holden as much as they used to.” [10]After talking to my classmates, I realize the same thing, the majority do not really like the book and its protagonist Holden Caulfield, and if they do, they like it after the teacher analyzed it in class.
Why? Is the book already dated so that teenagers nowadays no longer find themselves in Holden, or has it never been a book about teenage angst after all?
There are always different ways of interpreting a symbol, a metaphor or the meaning of a novel. The real problem Holden copes with, in my opinion, is not the conflict between the children’s world and the adults’ world, but rather, the trauma caused by Allie’s death, which leads to isolation, alienation, depression, loneliness and inability to relate to others and express his thoughts, and causes doubt about justice. As he sits quietly, observing and listening to people around him, he realizes that they all are hypocrites, but they are alive while a nice and smart person like Allie has to die. Everything becomes pointless. In “Norwegian Wood”, a novel by Haruki Murakami, after Kizuki’s death at the age of seventeen, his girlfriend Naoko does not want to grow older. She wants to be seventeen, wants to come back to the past when they were being together.[11] Similarly, Holden gets stuck in his memories not because he loves his childhood and detests adulthood, but more because he wants to get back to the time when Allie was alive and things made sense.
The tendency to want things to stand still and want to get back to the past occurs when people face a big loss and have to go through a hard time. Therefore he is frightened of changes in general. “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. […] Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all.” [12]
This interpretation provides another way of seeing Holden Caulfield and his wish of becoming a catcher. He is afraid of changes. And he sees people around him changing, in a negative way. He perhaps does not have the courage to meet Jane because he is afraid of being disappointed, and he prefers to keep her as an ideal girl in his memories with whom he used to play checkers. The idea of catcher might mean keeping the kids where they are, preventing them from moving towards the bad side of the world. The metaphorical question “Where do the ducks go?” [13] he raises and ponders shows his confusion: where to go when everything around is changing. He is lost. He is stuck.
Generally Holden is seen as a cynical boy. He makes negative comments on almost everyone and everything but never lets others know what he thinks because of his cowardice. He thinks Ackley has lousy teeth and lots of pimples, has terrible and nasty personality and gets on his nerves sometimes… and Stradlater is a slob that always makes himself look handsome but in fact never cleans his razor, and loves himself and takes advantage of others including Holden. But still, Holden remains sort of friends with them. He does nothing but cry when Maurice takes his money. And probably in other people’s eyes, he is nothing but a big loser. He goes to the club and dances with some morons (at least he thinks they are morons, real morons). He wants to have sex with a prostitute and fails. He has the opportunities to have sex with some girls, but always stops when they tell him to, whereas other guys do not, therefore he remains a virgin. He asks people for a drink even though they just meet for the first time, and gets rejected. He wants to call some people but finally does not. He gets kicked out of four schools. Not only is he unpopular, but he is also a loner with a few friends, and they are not even close to him. He does not know or prepare anything for the future. In short, he is lost.
The same thing might be said about Seymour Glass, another character created by J. D. Salinger, that appears or at least is mentioned in “Nine Stories”, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction”, “Franny and Zooey” and “Hapworth 16, 1924”. Even though “The Catcher in the Rye” is written in colloquial language with simple sentences, slangs and swearwords, and the other books have more formal language with long, complex sentences and a large vocabulary, the similarities between these two characters are quite remarkable. Both are loners, alienated, unable to fit in and get along with other people. Seymour’s wife, in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”, wishes that “Seymour would relate to more people” [14]. Both are runaways, whereas Holden leaves the dorm and goes away at night, Seymour does not turn up at his wedding. Both get stuck in their own world. Both are depressed, exhausted, confused, and disgusted by the world. Despite the age gap between them, both Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass are hopeless and vulnerable individuals because of their brilliance, thoughtfulness, hypersensitivity, their being observational and their ability to see more than others. It is also interesting to point out that there is a hint in the name of Seymour Glass. Seymour sounds like “see more”. And glass is, as everyone can see, hard but fragile. Other people look at them and can see that they are different, and troubled. But they do not understand, and do not try to understand.
In “Seeing through the Glass: Psychoanalysis and J. D. Salinger”, Noelle Madore wrote “Through his first literary appearance, Seymour, like Salinger, possesses a supreme appreciation and admiration for those untainted by society. The innocent are the opposite of anyone Seymour has ever encountered outside of his family, especially in regards to Muriel, who is the epitome of this societal corruption. Muriel’s world surrounds an emphasis on physical beauty and material possessions, all of which are elements Seymour has shied away from.” [15]In his eyes, it is a society where people favor materialism, think shallowly, pursue pointless things and have no attempt to have some understanding between one another. Our author J. D. Salinger, similarly, wrote for his own self, for his pleasure and chose a reclusive life as he disliked fame and the hypocrisy of the world he lived in.
We can see the same thing in Holden Caulfield, when we look back at “The Catcher in the Rye” after reading other works by J. D. Salinger. He thinks and sees a lot. He sees phonies around him. Mr. Spencer, his teacher, always looks serious and dignified in class, but when there are just two of them together in his house, he picks his nose. Or Mr. Ossenburger is described as “He told us we should always pray to God- talk to Him and all- wherever we were. […] He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs.” [16]Stradlater, the guy who always looks handsome and cool, is “a secret slob” [17]. Holden writes “You should’ve seen the razor he shaved himself with. It was always rusty as hell and full of lather and hairs and crap. He never cleaned it or anything.” [18]To some extent, Mr. Spencer and Stradlater are the same. They make themselves look good because they want others to have a good impression of them, but when they do not need to, they simply turn back to who they really are.
We can see that Holden pays lots of attention to small details, “If you want to know the truth, I can’t even stand ministers. The ones they’ve had at every school I’ve gone to, they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voices. They sound so phony when they talk.” [19]Most people normally do not care about trivial details, but Holden does, not because he is petty and irritable, but those very little and trivial details show what kind of people someone really is behind the mask. And because he is able to see how people really are, not how they want he sees they are, he regards everyone as phonies.
“I roomed with this boy, Dick Slagle, that had these very inexpensive suitcases. He used to keep them under the bed, instead of on the rack, so that nobody’s see them standing next to mine. […] What I did, I finally put my suitcases under my bed, instead of on the rack, so that old Slagle wouldn’t get a goddam inferiority complex about it. But here’s what he did. The day after I put mine under my bed, he took them out and put them back on the rack. The reason he did it, it took me a while to find out, was because he wanted people to think my bags were his.” [20]
Dick Slagle also pretends to be someone he is not, and wants people not to have a bad impression of him.
Holden also writes “The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they’ll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don’t like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they’ll say he’s conceited.” [21]
Or, there is a part Holden goes to the cinema. “The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards as heart. I’m not kidding.” [22]
Some of my classmates say when they read the book, they just wanted to slap Holden and tell him to shut up. In their opinion, he is so irritable. And he does not have to get annoyed with so many things, especially such small things. But he gets annoyed because he sees that people all the time think too much about what others think about them, and want to look good, want to be seen as something other than themselves. He sees them passively follow the majority. He likes kids not because he does not want to grow up and prefers his childhood, but kids are honest, and are nonconformists. At such young age, they live as who they naturally are, and have not yet thought about what they are supposed to be in other people’s eyes. Holden is the same. It might sound contradicting because Holden considers himself a terrific liar, and he lies a lot it becomes a habit, an unconscious habit over which he has no control. But he sees the loss of real values in the society. He sees what people are becoming. He does not conform to the social standards. He does not live the way he is supposed to live. He does not follow the majority. Like Seymour Glass. Like J. D. Salinger. That is most obvious, and sounds most like Salinger in the paragraph “You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things.” [23] He is an honest guy in a dishonest world, a nonconformist in a conformist world.
From my point of view, the theme of “The Catcher in the Rye” is not purely teen angst. There is something higher, bigger than that. J. D. Salinger attacks conformity. He does not attack the adults’ world, but the spirit of our age.
In “The Theme of Alienation in the Novels of J. D. Salinger”, professor R.Thiruvalluvan wrote:
“The hero in every Salinger story becomes a reflection of a moral code arising out of a cult of innocence, love, alienation and finally redemption. These heroes form a particularly adolescent troop of spiritual non-conformists, tough minded and fragile, humorous and heart breaking. These moral heroes are forced to compromise their integrity with a pragmatic society. What disaffiliate the heroes are their peculiar off-center vision which sensitize and distort their sense of truth in a false world.” [24]
The book is told by Holden Caulfield about the four days when he runs away. He asks strangers for a drink. He calls Faith Cavendish, a girl “that wasn’t exactly a whore or anything but that didn’t mind doing it once in a while” [25], asking her to go out for a cocktail. He goes to a club and dances with some boring women around thirty years old. He asks for a prostitute. All of these are his attempts to relate to other people and to conform to the social standards.
But it does not work. He does not feel closer to other people. Neither does he feel any better. Because his problem is, as already written, not that he does not want to grow up and thus makes some simple judgments about other people and calls everyone phonies, but the values he regards as essential no longer exist or have any significance in this world. For instance, he writes “The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl- a girl that isn’t a prostitute or anything, I mean- she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping.” [26]
That is why when Stradlater returns to the room after a date with Jane, Holden keeps asking about it. “If you didn’t go to New York, where’d ya go with her?”, “Cut it out. Where’d you go with her if you didn’t go to New York?”, “What’d you do? Give her the time in Ed Banky’s goddam car?” [27]And he gets infuriated and hits Stradlater.
Also, in his mind, Jane is a childhood friend who reads poetry and good books, is funny and sort of muckle-mouthed, used to practice ballet about two hours every day and play checkers with him. His memory of Jane is pure, very pure.
“Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.” [28]
The conflict of values is the cause of Holden’s alienation and depression. For him, sex is good when two persons love each other and both want it. And he remembers a person with nice things about them, like Jane likes ballet and worries that it makes her legs lousy, or his sister Phoebe has nice, pretty, little ears, writes books and gets affectionate sometimes, or his brother Allie writes poems in green ink all over his baseball mitt and never gets mad at anybody. Stradlater does not care. He dates a girl, has sex and forgets everything. He does not understand her, and does not feel like knowing her. The fact is, Stradlater does not belong to the minority, but most people around Holden, as he observes, also have pointless, meaningless pursuits. People want to look good rather than be good. People care more about sex than love. People favor materialism (for instance, his brother D. B is in Hollywood, “being a prostitute” [29]). People flow with the stream. People clap for the wrong things, and fail to notice little nice ones (for instance, he thinks it is nice when someone starts to talk about something else and gets excited, but other people keep yelling “Digression!”). People ruin things. And “You can’t even find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose”.[30]
In “The Saint as a young man- A reappraisal of The Catcher in the Rye”, Jonathan Baumbach wrote:
“Both Antolini and Spencer are too corrupt to notice that Holden is unable to cope with the world not because he hates, but because he loves and the world hates. […] Ejected from the shallow womb of the prep school, Holden goes out alone in the world of New York City in search of some kind of sustenance. His comic misadventures in the city, which lead to his ultimate disillusion and despair, make up the central action of the novel.” [31]
Theo Hobson wrote in the article “Salinger, Sex and Scruples” on “The Guardian”:
“So please: no more clichés about this being the sacred text of teenage rebellion, adolescent angst. This view robs the novel of its daring particularity. The reality is that is uses the setting of teenage rebellion in order to tackle a profound issue, the tension between sexual conformism and morality.” [32]
Holden is not an anti-conformist, who does the opposite of what others do, shouts clichés about freedom or love and leaves a group (of “ordinary people”) for another group (of “rebels”). He stands alone, as he has his own system of thoughts, system of values, and thinks independently. He is a witness of the corrupt world he lives in. He “not only suffers as a victim from the effects of the evil in this world, but for it as its conscience…” (Jonathan Baumbach)[33].
Conclusion
In the end, after closing the book readers might all have the same question: Is he healed? I guess it depends on how the reader personally perceives it. At first I thought he would feel better and accept the fact that he would become a grown-up like everybody else. But now, after reading other works by J. D. Salinger and interpreting the book in a different way, I am afraid that he might feel a bit better when he looks back and writes about it, but it is very unlikely that he might get rid of all the feeling of bitterness, disappointment and depression since it has nothing to do with growing up but he is disgusted with the phoniness around him in general.
In conclusion, Jennifer Schuessler’s thought about this book being irrelevant nowadays and today’s teenagers not liking it is now explained. “The Catcher in the Rye” is J. D. Salinger’s attack on conformity, hypocrisy, shallowness and the spirit of our age. Not everyone would love it, but after more than half a century people still read it, and people will keep reading it. And the book will, undoubtedly, resonate with anyone who has refused to go over that cliff.
Bibliography
Murakami, Haruki. Norwegian Wood. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. Vintage, 2000.
Salinger. J. D. Franny and Zooey. Penguin, 2010.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Penguin, 1994.
Salinger, J. D. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction. Penguin, 1964.
Salinger, J. D. Nine Stories. Boston- Little, Brown and Company, 1953.
[14] J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction (Penguin, 1964), p.13
why didn't you do a reference, but a bibliogrpahy?
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