We go through a few days in the life of a spoiled rich kid who is expelled from prep school in New York and wanders around town criticizing everyone, "phonies" all of them, and feeling sorry for himself.
Every now and then he gets sentimental about someone—a kindly teacher, an old girlfriend, his younger sister—but is quickly disillusioned. And in the end, for all his supposed rebellion, he is poised to take up his role again as a son of the privileged class. There seems nothing further to get. If you come to the novel having heard it's a great work of social criticism, you're bound to be disappointed. How profound or incisive can the interior carping of a self-centred twerp be?
To such disappointed readers, I can only say, "Yes, you've got a point. Maybe it's not destined to become one of the great universal classics of American lit up there with Huckleberry Finn. In fact, I suspect the legions of its dismissers will grow the further we get from the zeitgeist of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Of primary importance is its style and what scholars refer to as its voice. Right from the first line, Salinger serves notice this story is not going to be presented like anything its readers had ever read before.
The line dispensing with "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" heralds both a new kind of story structure specifically not a Dickens-style coming-of-age story and a new kind of language to tell the story. Lots of writers had used profane speech before, but few had made this an entire novel.
Salinger sustains the profane, adolescent tone of Holden Caulfield as narrator through almost the entire novel, without a false note struck in more than two hundred pages. Today, with generations of scribes having copied this trick, it's hard to realize what an astounding feat this was back then. Caulfield's verbal tics have provided material for parodies: tagging sentences with vague phrases like "and all" and "if you want to know the truth", overusing "phonies", putting "old" before people's names, spicing it up with weak expletives like "goddam" and "for God's sake"—and everything "driving me crazy".
Salinger is easily satirized for lines like "People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it. However, its crudeness was looked down upon by many parents that resulted in the frequent request to ban the book from being taught.
Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is one of the greatest works of literature, but was also very controversial. The Catcher in the Rye tells the story of Holden Caulfield, a teenager facing psychological trouble. Expelled from his school at 16, he goes on a journey.
Many argue that it has no business being taught in schools or even the praise it gets, and should be banned. He is unwilling to accept the reality that he has to eventually let go. Holden Caulfield's foreshadowed mental breakdown.
And though this work caused much controversy, Salinger was able to capture the struggles of not wanting to grow up and the preservation of innocence. In The Catcher in the Rye, J. D Salinger creates a character that reflects his own difficulties growing up in a privileged white. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. The Catcher in the Rye was written by J.
Salinger in , four years after the beginning of the Cold War. The story revolves around a character named Holden Caulfield, an outsider to his society and an unreliable narrator. After the war, especially in the United States, things looked great as there was a lot of money and opportunity. Stories about young people coming of age, known as a bildungsroman in literary studies, had been previously penned by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.
The unconventional, conversational tone of the book turned it into a cult hit, then a bestseller. However, some of the content, where the main character has an encounter with a prostitute, meant it has become controversial.
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