The Importance of The Catcher in the Rye

This summer I was inspired to re-read The Catcher in the Rye after watching a recent documentary on JD Salinger entitled "Salinger."  While I always knew that this was an important book, it was an experience to rediscover it as an adult.  We are told by teachers that if we look at books that we read in high school or college later in life they will mean something different.  In the case of The Catcher in the Rye, they are absolutely correct.

As a matter of background, I want to set up how I was reading this book.  We were going to Disney World this past August, and I told myself I would spend time reading it on the plane.  I was on a Hemingway kick just prior to the trip and wanted something different to sink my teeth into.  On the plane ride we experienced a great deal of turbulence and I found myself not only reading the book as a way to discover it anew, but also as something I clung to as a safety net amidst the up and downs of a "bumpy ride" to the "most magical place on earth."  Through that experience I became even more invested in Holden Caulfield as I tried to shut out the two hour-plus ride to florida.

The book is a wonderful journey into adolescence, which I didn't see the first time I read it in high school so many years ago, probably because I was going through it myself.  More importantly, as a teacher myself, I realized that the issues students deal with everyday are not that different that what was important sixty years ago.  They are just dressed up differently.  Instead of a red hunting hat, we have kids with iPhones and sports teams hats.  While there were some phrases that are outdated, at its core, The Catcher in the Rye is timeless and can help teachers and even parents understand a generation that we may think is so different than ours, yet they all crave the same things.  Of course, many people already know this, but it was fun to experience it rather than being told by someone what to think about a piece of art.

On a larger, historical note, I see this book as an example of the same transition that the nation was going through in the wake of World War II.  The post-war world was in a period of adolescence and it was a coming of age for the United States.  We were experiencing our own maturity into foreign affairs. The vacuum that the war created was something that the United States capitalized on without knowing how to do it.  Indeed, it was a time where few leaders understood their new place in the world, much like the young Holden Caulfield.   The journey he embarks on in NYC is similar to America's position in the world.  The nation navigated through geopolitics in the late forties and early fifties - a time where America was trying to stave off a growing Soviet threat throughout the world while also maintain the economic abundance that was the product of the war.

Finally, The Catcher in the Rye is just plain fun and a special book.  If you've read it, try again.  If you have not read it or read the spark notes in school, give it a true shot.  It truly spans generations.  On the plane ride home, a couple in the row behind me noticed that I was reading it.  "I had to comment on the book you are reading," one of them said.  "It's my favorite."