The Catcher in the Rye
The title of Salinger’s famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is based on
what Holden Caulfield describes as his ideal job. This job reflects the various facets of
Holden’s character, including his love and craving for innocence, the need he
feels for stability, and his loner ways and outlook on life.
Holden is first
introduced to this job when listening to a young child sing ‘when a body catch
a body coming through the rye.’ The idea lingers, and soon an altered version
of that becomes his ideal profession, reflecting what he feels going on inside
himself.
Holden has shown clearly that what he values and desires above all is innocence and
honesty. All around him, instead of this
purity, he sees a façade that everyone works to support. "You never saw so
many phonies in your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about
the play so that everybody could know how sharp they were." 1
His idealized occupation reflects this; in the world he’s created for himself,
children embody this innocence. Beyond that, even, the children aren’t in any
pain or distress; they’re playing a game, laughing and running blindly through
a field of rye. Holden is mourning his own loss of innocence in this, as well as
a strong protectiveness over these other children, an overpowering desire to
keep this innocence safe from the dangers that lie in wait.
Holden knows that his situation is unstable, and he responds to this with a
sharp loathing for change and a strong desire for control. He has to savor what
few, fixed things exist in his life, tossed around as he is by outrageous mood
swings. He varies between love and hate, anger and tears, in an instant.
"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed
right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there go there a hundred
times, and that Eskimo would still just be finished catching those two fish." 2 In his ideal job he’s
maintaining a stability that he himself lacks; he’s stopping children from
plunging headlong off a cliff. If they fall, and he isn’t there to catch them,
they will spin downwards, out of control. While he can’t maintain stability in
his own life, Holden dreams of keeping these children from dizzying,
uncontrolled freefall.
Holden is a loner, undeniably different from his peers, and suffers from
more than the usual teenage anxiety. The title of the book reflects this in that
his chosen profession is one that doesn’t actually exist. Holden, rather than
choosing for himself a job such as lawyer, the purer form of which involves
working for good, picks an occupation that exists only in his imagination. He
does this because everything he sees around him in real life is tarnished with
this façade; everything has been touched by what he deems phony. "But you
don’t do that kind of stuff (‘saving innocent lives’) if you’re a
lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy
cars and drink Martinis." 3
His ability to see through this outward show that people put on forces Holden
to confront the fact that innocence is a rare, precious thing, and that the real
world cannot hold up to the world he would like to live in. As Louis Menand
said in his recent New Yorker article, "...sees through other human beings
as quickly, as clearly, or as unforgivingly as he does. Holden is a demon of
verbal incision." 4 Holden,
by choosing a profession so unconventional, is showing once again how he is
different from others, how he sees through the acts that humans put on and
rejects the reality he is faced with.
The title, The Catcher in the Rye, is significant because it ties together
three of Holden’s most defining characteristics; his love for innocent, pure
things, his desire for stability, and his loner outlook on life. Salinger chose
this title because it defines Holden, managing to capture in a few words the
young man’s fascinating character. Holden is the only adult in this world of
his creation, alone in a field of rye with children playing all around. He alone
is responsible for catching them as they plunge headfirst off a cliff.
This piece was originally prepared for my English 10 class. It has been
reformatted for E2. Prepared for the
Everything2 Support Your Local
Library Quest.
Footnotes
1 Salinger
(1945), 126
2 Salinger (1945), 121
3 Salinger (1945), 172
4 Menand (2001), 82
Bibliography
SALINGER, J. D. (1945) The Catcher in the Rye. New
York, New York: Bantam Books.
MENAND, Louis. (2001) Holden at Fifty. The New Yorker, October 1.