If you really want to hear about it, is how the incredibly authentic and realistic novel published in 1951 follows the story 16-year-old holden Caulfield started and every word after is the twist and turn events that follow Holdens expulsion. This novel made no shame of taking on the heavy but nonetheless realistic topic of maturing and experiencing the adult world.
The farcical thing is though that the novel doesn’t make it a point that this kid out here taking in one heavy hearted thing after the next, but it just tells it like an unconventional 16-year-old would. Like it was just a regular Tuesday he was retelling. Which to him he was.
It’s this aspect that gives this book this refreshing feeling to it, for it to not sound like this heavy-hearted story’s being told by this “troubled flunk out.” For it to just sound like an unorthodox kid telling his story like he would a friend.
What really ties the whole book together is that even with this casual story narration with an unreliable and somewhat cynical main character and narrator it still gets its point across.
Half of what makes this book riveting is that you’ll spend most of the damn book looking for the point. And if you don’t have open enough eyes to see it you may not. This doesn’t stop the book from making a point though. That your Gunna get older that the worlds Gunna change, nothing will be perfect or pure anymore, and that’s the terms you must make. You’ll miss it but those are the terms you must make.
The way the author projects this through Holden is incredible, in my frame of mind. The capture meant of this view on adult hood and life through the eyes of this 16-year-old. The “phony-ness” he sees in the adults and fellow peers around him. The way he hates this conventional approach to everything that he thinks everyone seems to have.
This train of thought is what makes the book so authentic. Cause this is what I find myself thinking sometimes and this is what many teenagers even now 73 years later, is how we feel about this beginning stage of adulthood. The phoniness of people as they guild their way through life and how we see it plain as day. How we can’t choose how to feel on the child like behaviors and views we had just left behind. Whether to lament them or shelter those who still have them.
The unconventional and honestly random way the author presents this through the spur of the moment rambling Holden has expressing “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 do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.” It eminently ties together what this novel is about.
Holden being fed up with the phoniness of the conventional adulthood around him and his desire to preserve and capture that childish wonder. But having to face the coming-of-age experience of making terms with knowing that’s not realistic, that you can just “trap it behind the glass and have it stay the same” that there’s Gunna be that “f-ck you” written somewhere nice and that’s the conventionality of adulthood. That there isn’t a catcher In The rye.
That’s what makes this novel the incredibly authentic and warts and all story it is. From Holden as an unconventional teen to the theme of the book. how it’s just a 16 teen year-old boy iterating the week after he got expelled, that’s what knocked me out.