You may never truly understand why The Catcher in the Rye is acclaimed as one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.
It has nothing to do with your level
intelligence,
education, degree of
appreciation for
literature,
age,
sex,
religion,
race,
background or
upbringing. It's not bad thing if you don't get it. It's not like an eleven-year-old saying that
Shakespeare is stupid because of all of
the words he or she doesn't understand. I'll do my best to explain. The deciding factor is whether or not there exists an imbalance of
chemicals within your brain that leads to... you guessed it,
depression.
Catcher isn't a
social commentary. I've heard people that think that they understand the book a
thousand times say that it is. I had a teacher try to wrestle the suggested questions and discussions in her
teacher's edition into that perspective. It didn't work too well. If you want an example of a social commentary, take something like
A Clockwork Orange.
Holden Caulfield is a young man who simply can't find anything that makes him feel good. His subconscious is acutely aware of this, but he isn't. Holden isn't a
misfit or a
troublemaker, he's actually a pretty nice kid. He's not
melodramatic and
self-pitying either. The major
re-occuring theme in the book is that Holden makes an honest effort to do something that he subconsciously hopes will help him find meaning, or at the worst allow him to enjoy himself. But guess what? Nothing does. No matter how hard he tries, Holden gets nothing back. At the end of the story (the beginning of the book) he's
institutionalized.
The reason that Holden keeps calling people "
phony" isn't because they seek social
status, wear expensive clothes or lie about their achievements, like superficial people do. It's because Holden looks out at the world and sees that most of the world doesn't really have the problems he does. Most of the world looks pretty "
happy" and doesn't need to do all of the
soul-searching he does. He doesn't know this explicitly, but he gets a strong feeling about it. Not understanding that he is different than most others, he subconsciously reasons that they're all faking their contentness with their lives-- hence "phonies". Of course, the truth is the opposite; everyone else is pretty okay and Holden is the one holding up a
facade of normalcy.
You see, most people don't have trouble being "happy" or comfortable with themselves. Some people need a little more. That's what religion does for
a lot of people... it's the boost they need. Some people need medication. Some people need to have a
signifigant other who is the same way that they are to depend on. Some need even more than that, like to live in a
Buddhist monastary. Some people look for temporary solutions, like drugs,
sex or
violence. Some people, like poor Holden, never find what they need. For some people,
it may not exist at all.*
* For those of you who don't believe that there are people who can never find stability, you're more than welcome to have your own beliefs, but did you know that approximately two percent of the schizophrenic population cannot be effectively treated with any known method at all?