欧宝娱乐

Apparently you were too old and wise when you read this book. I was in middle school when I read and re-read everything I could find by Salinger and absolutely adored him. I wanted to rebel and to think and to be "real" and see the world and at the time, this book spoke to those wishes. Now I am sure I would find it trite and passe.

Really, there wasn't a plot to this story. It was just a teenagers days after being kicked out of boarding school. That is all. This is one of my favorite novels ever, and I think the reason for that is because (now, get ready: you are going to think I am a pathetic excuse of a human being) I can relate to Holden's character. I understood his mood swings because, being a teenager myself, I have the same mood swings. His cursing was essential, because us teens are constantly using vulgarities. I know damned well adults would hate this book, that's why I don't recommend it to my mom (who really wanted to read it); but to a teenager, it wonderfully captures what it's like to be a teen.

See, the thing was I read this in high school, and just could not identify with Holden at all. On the other hand, I read Franny and Zooey and loved it, so I guess it's all relative.

Madeline, I so am with you on this one. I read it twice - once in high school, and once in grad school. Nope, didn't like it (or get it) either time. Why is this a classic again? Why did my high school lit teacher get starry eyed when she talked about this book symbolizing her whole generation??

He's (holden) transitioning from childhood to adulthood and shit isn't making sense like it used to. That girl he always felt he shared a special connection with probably doesn't even remember him, school isn't a piece of cake anymore, and his favorite teacher turned out to be a creepy old maybe-sexual predator. So yeah, the plot's just him walkin' around and introspectin' out loud and shit, but the story's about trying to come to terms with learning that you were probably wrong about a lot of things you were convinced you were right about. so if you can't relate to that i suppose the book wouldn't make much sense... made sense to me though.

is that 5 spot still on the table? i'm hella broke.

I guess that's all true, and I think if I re-read this I would probably be able to see the brilliance of the story a little better.

But when I read it in high school, I just looked at the page and saw "Blah blah bullshit bullshit blah blah emo bullshit. Crumby."

Your $5 prize will have to be split between you and the other dozen people who've tried explaining this book to me. Expect your 14 cents to arrive in the mail within 6-8 weeks.

i read this book in high school and loved it. read everything else by salinger. ate it up. then i taught this book. as an adult, upon my first re-reading, i couldn't stand it. i couldn't figure out why it was a "classic." but when i taught it, the appeal of the book came through to my students. i teach juniors, so they can relate to holden: his disenchantment, his hostility, his scattered emotions. does he wine? without a doubt. does he feel like he doesn't belong? of course. this is why the kids like it. they call him on his bullshit, but his inability to connect with anyone other than his sister, they can relate. also, much of salinger's works are autobiographical. and salinger was pretty eccentric.

It's weird - I loved Franny and Zooey, so Salinger's writing style or stories aren't the problem. For whatever reason, Holden and I just didn't click.

I love this book, altho I think it has obvious flaws and I know it just turns some people off, but what the hell, I'll have a go at explaining how I read it.

I think, like Anthony says above, Catcher's a story of disillusion -- a primal loss of innocence, which is even pointed out sharply twice in the narrative itself (Mr A tells Holden he's 'heading for a terrible fall,' and Holden actually falls and passes out in the restroom). I think it's not so much about 'alienation' (which everyone says) as loss, the natural loss which takes place in life every moment as a result of the passage of time. Holden indeed is losing Phoebe, his classmates, the girl he loves and the girl he dates, his place in society, everything; and at then at the end he's locked away in some kind of hospital (I think it might've been clearer when it was published he's probably being isolated on suspicion of TB; nowadays readers tend to assume he's in a mental hospital), telling it all to us and an unseen sympathetic narrator (_not_ his older writer-brother, in whom he's disillusioned too -- who _hasn't_ let Holden down?) like some kind of modern teenage boy Scheherazade, trying to preserve his own life in the medium of a story. But it doesn't work; he has nowhere to go.

I think the American educational system's attempt to map it onto all psyches as a parable of Everyteen is mistaken. The book is really specifically, to me, about loss and nostalgia, as in that famous part when Holden thinks even if you could go back to the Museum as a child and nothing had physically changed, _you_ would be different. There's no holding onto anything. The whole action of the plot is him trying to reclaim various bits of his past -- his childhood home, his sister Phoebe, his favourite teacher, the guy who plays the piano (don't remember his name). Jane and D.B. and nearly everyone else he misses are just as gone as Allie.

Buddy Glass says in another Salinger book 'The Great Gatsby was my Huckleberry Finn,' and I think Gatsby permeates this book (Holden even reads it, along with Isak Dinesen and Thomas Hardy). 'Can't repeat the past -- of course you can!' Both Holden and Gatsby try their damndest to recapture the past (Jane and Sally are sort of a combination Daisy) and the final sentences of both books focus on the fatality of nostalgia:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning....
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn't know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

It's interesting to me you liked F&Z but not Holden - Zooey strikes me as being very like Holden,* in his speech patterns and yearning and cynicism. He's kind of like a grown-up Holden who found something to do, and Fanny is more like the lost Holden, finding consolation not in her friends or studies or lover. (Even the structure of the books matches up - Franny more or less confesses herself to Zooey as Holden does to the unseen doctor. Zooey's is the answering confession Holden doesn't get back.) The reversal is that instead of Holden getting an emotional wordless epiphany in Phoebe's presence watching her on the carousel (symbol of childhood, and he doesn't caution her against trying to grab the ring, which is what children do) -- typical of Salinger's early work which also happens in several short stories -- Franny (and the reader)'s directed to her epiphany by the very verbal Zooey.

In fine it's like Wolfe said - you can't go home again, you can't go back to your childhood or youth or family or whatever, and the effort to do so is fatal, psychologically if not physically. (I haven't read Proust so I don't know how well his quest 'in seach of lost time' goes but IIRC it's not presented as tragic. That seems to be perhaps a rather American view.)


*

(If you look at Salinger's published uncollected work there's an interesting overlap between his characters -- John 'Babe' Gladwaller knows the Caufield brothers and his little sister Mattie is a dead ringer for Holden's sister Phoebe, and Franny has also always struck me as a grown-up Phoebe, and then Buddy Glass is jokingly presented as the author of Catcher and Bananafish, as well as supposedly writing F&Z and Seymour, so maybe I'm not as mistaken in thinking there's a -- well, family similarity?)

It's the first "teen fiction" novel, proving, that like Heart of Darkness doing a full story in dialogue, that doing something first (NOT best) will get your books mass produced for education purposes.

Well, I absolutely loved it. The main reason why I enjoy this book so much is because I personally do relate to holden, but also because I just really like the style of writing. The story just captures me and I can't stop reading when I start! But that is al just a matter of personal taste. I would have to say that a lot of people say that theydon't like this books because theris no development and holden just continues to whine about his life. And I do think that you can see him changin. In the last part of the book he is realising that he can't protect all innocence and that you have to let kids "reach for the gold ring" (I am talking about the end with phoebe and the carrousel) I just really love this book. just finished it gain today! xx

oh, I just read my message over, and I am sorry for all the spelling mistakes. had to do that really fast! xx

lol. This is why I follow your reviews, so dead on. I was just about to shelve this one in the can't finish pile.

I think I should get the five dollars. I will eventually explain the ducks in my review section of the book.

The Catcher in the Rye is about WW2. It is a story within a story. Holden (which is the name of a car) is just a vehicle to "understand" the WW2. See my review. When you understand that Salinger couldn't say what he knew about this war so he wrote it as a children's book... Just like Felix Salten in Bambi (not the Disney version, which is probably why Salinger didn't get his published.

Salinger tells you this is nit a David Copperfield story. So don't read it like it is about Holden. Hint: look at the first page of David Copperfield to understand "Caiulfields" name.

I hope you will reread it again. This time when you get to the Merry go round play the music Salinger said was playing, and see if that makes sense or if he is using this book to tell you about money, power and war.

Holden Caulfield is a 16-year-old whose just been kicked out of a school for the fourth time. Instead of going home and admitting it to his parents right away, he decides to wander around New York City and engage in such exciting and important events as getting beat up by a pimp and asking where ducks go in the winter (hint: the answer is "to the South"). The book isn't so much about what Holden does as it is about what he thinks. At the start of the book Holden is very obsessed with genuineness and innocence, even though he has neither. Holden spends a lot of time complaining that other people are "phonies" while also bragging about how easily he can lie to people and constantly making up characters for himself to act out with other people (like when he meets the mother of another Pencey student and pretends to be polite and to know her son, neither of which is genuine). An example of Holden's focus on innocence is his run-in with the prostitute. Though he's nervous and tells the prostitute he changed his mind because he's recovering from surgery, the real reason Holden doesn't want to be seduced by her is that he doesn't want to accept that she's not innocent, and he also doesn't want that lack of purity to rub off on him. Innocence is very important to Holden because he was deeply affected by the death of his brother, who died young, and preserving other people's innocence is Holden's way of not dealing with his brother's passing (and the fact that his brother will always be innocent).
Holden's younger sister, Pheobe, represents both innocence and genuineness to Holden, and because of this (and the fact that he's already lost one sibling) he is the most focused on protecting her innocence.The ending of the book shows that Holden has grown from who he was in the beginning because he allows Pheobe to ride the carousel even though he's scared of her falling while trying to grab the gold ring, which is symbolic of Holden accepting that he can't protect her forever and it's better for both of them if he just lets go sometimes.

I think you accidentally posted your book report here - this is a comment thread for a review, not your English 101 teacher's inbox.

Madeline wrote: "I think you accidentally posted your book report here - this is a comment thread for a review, not your English 101 teacher's inbox."

Seems like you owe that person $5.

They'll get that $5 when they pry it from my cold, dead hands!

Madeline is so right in what she wrote i didn't understand the plot of this book do not read it

Look on Sparknotes and everything will become clear but it is a phenomenal deeper meaning that will resonate with you.

Yep, I completely identify with your frustration. I couldn't find a plot in there anywhere, either.

same here..may be i should ask Woody Allen..who has been doing free promotion of this book

I read this as a teenager and as an adult. It had nothing to offer either of us, so I burnt my copy on the fire which was the most satisfying thing this book has done for me. I think people can't get over the bluntness of Holden. What I wanted to know was to what end? None. Hence pointless.

I am delighted by the idea of someone with the username "organicearthful" responding to a terrible book by burning it and therefore releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere.

Good work, buddy.

It's all about the moment in the life that you become an adult and you don't want to change, you want to do easy things but important things like be a catcher in the rye.

The Catcher in the Rye is a story about a mediocre white boy deciding that his decision to remain a mediocre white boy makes him rebellious.

Hard pass.

This book is good because it's an enjoyable read.

Rebuttal: this book is bad because it's not an enjoyable read.

See how that works?

I had to read Catcher for an undergraduate course (back in the Industrial Age) and the professor introduced his lecture on the book by saying that he'd spent most of his adult reading life believing that he hated it, only to realize that he didn't hate the book, he just hated the people who love it.
Me? I hate the book. It's phony, as Holden would say.
I really enjoy your writing, btw.

Lol, your comment kills me, it really does.

Probably the most over analyzed book in history. If you just read it for what it is and not dissect every word you might enjoy it. I found it hilarious myself and I've read it a few times. I just happen to like the way Salinger wrote so that's part of the pleasure for me. If I met Holden in real life I might have to slap him but reading about him is fun. Oh and one more thing.. THERE IS NO FUCKING PLOT!!!!

I'll take your $5 ... wait, I can't, your task is impossible.

That's the point. There is no plot. Cannery Row was about a bunch of drunks having a party for a friends--basically plotless--and was also great. Plots are overrated.

I can be completely wrong, but it looks like a book showing a few (boring) days in the perspective of someone having a mental breakdown... at least the way he view things, his mood sings, and a lot of things in this book made me think of the symptoms of it.

BUT anyway Holden still a egocentric hypocritical phony and the book sucks.

One word: Seinfeld

It鈥檚 the story of a not well child struggling though 48 hours of his life. If you are mentally and physically unwell sometimes there is no plot!

Saying that this book has no plot just proves your ignorance of this literature. I used to think that the film "A Christmas Story" had no plot but that is not true, you just have to look deeper to find it. The plot of The Catcher in the Rye is: A young boy named Holden is kicked out of school. He doesn't care so much about being kicked out but he knows his parents will be mad. Holden has a very pessimistic view of society and the book follows Holden on his journey home through the city... Is it a very simple plot, yes, but this book is not about the story but about the characters. The reason why people love this book so much is because there is something in it for everyone, the book changes as you change, reading the book as a young teenager, you are likely to relate to how Holden thinks and feels about things. Whereas growing up and reading when you are older, you will likely see that Holden hasn't learned to grow up and his views of the world and his actions are very juvenile. Now that I explained the plot and why the book is amazing please send me my $5 Thank You.

Insulting people with a different opinion = totally mature.

Got your five dollars right here.

It is Literary Fiction, so the story is just about how the characters act and speak. If you are looking for a good plot, you'll want to read Genre Fiction. People love Literary Fiction because it gives a deeper connection with the characters (like in the Outsiders). Anyone who thinks the book isn't a wonderful classic just simply doesn't understand the beautiful writing that J. D. Salinger uses in this book. People just need to understand the difference between literary and genre fiction, then recognize that this is literary and appreciate the great characters.

jewel wrote "Madeline is so right in what she wrote i didn't understand the plot of this book do not read it"
Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean everyone shouldn't read it. It isn't about the plot... It is about the wonderful characters. ex. prostitute=lack of innocence. People really need to dig deeper and look at the characters to understand why this is such an amazing book!

Madeline,
When i first read this book i was hugely disappointed. How could this be a "classic". I nearly chunked it in the garbage.

I changed my mind when a teenager i asked said he would read it again. I thought i must have missed something. I slogged through the book again. Right at the end there is a carousel that is playing the song"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes". If you are not familiar with this song i invite you to listen to it. It is not a happy song.

In fact it was recorded at Abby Road during the war to play to the Germans at the end of the war.

Salinger had a rough assignment during the war! I think that The Catcher in the Rye is an allegory to tell us about War and Power.

Their is so much in The Catcher that it took Salinger 10 years to write it.

Hint, the first paragraph mentionsDavid Copperfield David Copperfield. Read the first page of that book and you will learn something about Holden Caulfield!

Now investigate little further. Read about the history of Holden. A car factory in Australia. Why were they tooling up to make war machines in 1931, way before Hitler came to power.

Oh yeah, who bought the Holden factory. Interesting that every car mentioned in The Catcher is by this car manufacturer, except one. Can you remember which one and what country that car was from.

There are references to books and movies in The Catcher. You must read and watch them all if you are going to piece the "code" together. Why did Salinger have to write a book about ww1 and WW2 (and there is even some references to the civil war) in code?

Because it was a popular war and the victors get to write the history, but Salinger saw a different side to war. Truth is short change in war.

What is also interesting is that Salinger went to Poland for his family business interest before the war. What was he doing?

Read The 39 Steps
Pheobe watched the movie 10 times. Both the movie and the book are reference in The Catcher (like how he got a good goodbye)

Or just for fun read Romeo and Juliet from Holden's point of view. Reason everything through the filter of WW1 and WW2.

But the most frustrating thing was the amount of time he spent talking about ducks. Give me a break. Went through the whole book looking for an explanation....
Then i Google ed

WW2 ducks

Go ahead read about it....who made them. Starting to see the point of the book? Brilliant!

If you want to read an amazing book without a straight out plot, try Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. Beautiful prose can make a story for itself.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who is wondering what is the plot

The book is up for interpretation, that is why there鈥檚 no plot. It鈥檚 up for you to decide what it鈥檚 really about

I think that there is really a large plot in this. It is a young persons search for meaning and self understanding that resolves with his success. I like to think it was never meant to be the kind of books that everyone sits around a table and marvels over, but more of a relatable and melancholy story that resounds with the reader not because of the words Salinger uses, but because of the meaning behind them.

In some cases, when it comes to classics, people are afraid to disagree with the popular opinion, because classics.
Igor

Did you know this review of yours is in a BookBub funniest reviews post?

Link please?

I guess I should be flattered that I鈥檝e written the worst review of Catcher in the Rye anyone can find in the past six years.

(Seriously though, this review is a RELIC)