Catcher in the Rye as literature--any redeeming value or just "relevant"?

[St_Francis]

I have always hated the book CITR, because it just seems so useless and full of stuff I don’t think people should be exposed to (yeah, I’m not too thrilled with tv today either!), esp being forced to read and discuss it at school, esp in a co-ed situation!

But I’m working on a lit project and have to put forth some thoughts about it, which my thought is take it off the list–blech!!! but before I do that I decided to check it out here and see what people who are not biased but who are Catholic think about it.

And also ask if there’s a good alterntive to suggest. (I am already going to suggest some hostorical fiction works, for example.

Thanks for any thoughts!

 

[Linusthe2nd]

I have always hated the book CITR, because it just seems so useless and full of stuff I don’t think people should be exposed to (yeah, I’m not too thrilled with tv today either!), esp being forced to read and discuss it at school, esp in a co-ed situation!

But I’m working on a lit project and have to put forth some thoughts about it, which my thought is take it off the list–blech!!! but before I do that I decided to check it out here and see what people who are not biased but who are Catholic think about it.

And also ask if there’s a good alterntive to suggest. (I am already going to suggest some hostorical fiction works, for example.

Thanks for any thoughts!

Ditto, I hated it, very depressing, evil. We don’t have to read about evil to know it exists and what causes it. The group of kids shows how various peoples degererated into immorality and barbarism. It is the very struggle we are having today. But we don’t have to watch in unfold or see it in print to understand it. It is not great or even good literature.

Linus2nd

 

[IBombAtomically]

I suppose it’s a matter of taste. I’m Catholic (not cafeteria, either) and I loved that book. Gosh I must’ve read it a gazillion times, but I enjoyed all of Salinger’s other books as well. As corny as this sounds, we’re naming our daughter (who’s due any day now!) after a Salinger short story… of course with a solid Saint’s middle name
CITR has literary merit and is rather morally tame compared to today’s junk (well, Holden does get a prostitute but he ends up not sleeping with her) and as a Catholic I can relate to feeling like a cultural outsider… the hollowness if society and so forth.

 

[St_Francis]

I suppose it’s a matter of taste. I’m Catholic (not cafeteria, either) and I loved that book. Gosh I must’ve read it a gazillion times, but I enjoyed all of Salinger’s other books as well. As corny as this sounds, we’re naming our daughter (who’s due any day now!) after a Salinger short story… of course with a solid Saint’s middle name
CITR has literary merit and is rather morally tame compared to today’s junk (well, Holden does get a prostitute but he ends up not sleeping with her) and as a Catholic I can relate to feeling like a cultural outsider… the hollowness if society and so forth.

Thanks for your response

I remember he had a lot of stuff about his sexual fantasies… do you think that the literary value makes up for that? And what about girls’s reading it, or its being taught in a co-ed classroom?

Do you think that this feeling of being outside is very common among teens (and possibly people in general), in which case it could show teens that these feelings are normal and so something to work through rather than being some sort of statement about “who they are”?

 

[St_Francis]

Ditto, I hated it, very depressing, evil. We don’t have to read about evil to know it exists and what causes it. The group of kids shows how various peoples degererated into immorality and barbarism. It is the very struggle we are having today. But we don’t have to watch in unfold or see it in print to understand it. It is not great or even good literature.

Linus2nd

Are you thinking of Lord of the Flies? (I hated that too… and, argh!!! Heart of Darkness!!!)

Some of these books are why for decades I hated Literature. (The other reason was the Marxist and radical feminist teachers I had.)

 

[savedbygrace71]

I loathed the Lord of the Flies which I think the previous poster was thinking of. It was truly nauseating in its amoral disintegration of society in such a short time. I remember reading it and feeling true fear.
There were a lot of literary works in that vein- I am an English lit major and sadly the majority of our required reading was at the least maudlin, if not bleak and depressing.
But Catcher in the Rye- yes one of my all time favorites. As a high school girl reading it, it actually wasn’t a novel that would have lead me to behave poorly or become less moral. In fact, Holden’s narrative shows he is so clearly seeking for some truth and a path to follow, that I found it quite the opposite. He doesn’t want to be part of the frivolous fakey world around him. Such an appealing character! I highly recommend it and, in fact, think I’ll go read it again!!

 

[polytropos]

The book had a big effect on me… I became incredibly depressed when I read it in high school. I wasn’t a practicing Catholic at the time. I was doing very well in school but didn’t care much for what I was studying, felt like I would be funneled into a college major, job, and life that I didn’t like… eventually I got over it and realized that my perspective of the way life worked was a bit simplistic, but there was a period of maybe 2-3 months that I spent feeling unbelievably sad. I thought about talking to someone about depression because I thought I must have had some sort of problem, although I never did, and once I worked out the cognitive issues it subsided (so the cause didn’t seem to be physiological).

 

[GEddie]

Like it or not, this book is part of the general culture.

As such, I’m not sure it is worth protesting or objecting to. A discussion of it can in fact lead to wholesome ideas of how to deal with the very human issues it raises (death, mourning, depression, teenage angst, etc).

ICXC NIKA.

 

[St_Francis]

I loathed the Lord of the Flies which I think the previous poster was thinking of. It was truly nauseating in its amoral disintegration of society in such a short time. I remember reading it and feeling true fear.
There were a lot of literary works in that vein- I am an English lit major and sadly the majority of our required reading was at the least maudlin, if not bleak and depressing.

Yeah, that is the weird thing about Lit!

But Catcher in the Rye- yes one of my all time favorites. As a high school girl reading it, it actually wasn’t a novel that would have lead me to behave poorly or become less moral. In fact, Holden’s narrative shows he is so clearly seeking for some truth and a path to follow, that I found it quite the opposite. He doesn’t want to be part of the frivolous fakey world around him. Such an appealing character! I highly recommend it and, in fact, think I’ll go read it again!!

OK, maybe I should re-read it

As GEddie mentioned, it seems to be required in so many schools that it has become part of the culture, which was what first gave me pause about a thumbs-down on it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I read it in college and haven’t returned to it since. It didn’t seem to me it had a lot of redeeming value, particularly since it seemed at least part of a generation of young people found a way to identify with the main character.

“Pop psychologizing” characters in literature is almost always a mistake. So let’s say Caulfield is a profoundly sick person morally and spiritually. Everybody is a “phony”. His view of reality is almost worthy of a young Taliban. He has essentially no real insight into human beings and their behavior. And he’s remorselessly judgmental and unforgiving, though he sort of forgives Antonlini at the end when Caulfield decompensates.

As a model of one of the mental pitfalls into which sometimes young people fall; as an examplar of everything wrong with the views of some young people in that era, Caulfield succeeds as a character. But to what end? Did Salinger intend Caulfield to be an exemplar of how warped young people can get when their self-righteousness and naivete is overwhelming? Or was Salinger himself the sicker of the two?

I can’t say I ever quite figured that out. We were required to write a number of papers while taking that book in a literature class on novels. I will have to say I was a contrarian to most views. But I did well grade-wise.

 

[St_Francis]

The book had a big effect on me… I became incredibly depressed when I read it in high school. I wasn’t a practicing Catholic at the time. I was doing very well in school but didn’t care much for what I was studying, felt like I would be funneled into a college major, job, and life that I didn’t like… eventually I got over it and realized that my perspective of the way life worked was a bit simplistic, but there was a period of maybe 2-3 months that I spent feeling unbelievably sad. I thought about talking to someone about depression because I thought I must have had some sort of problem, although I never did, and once I worked out the cognitive issues it subsided (so the cause didn’t seem to be physiological).

Thanks so much–I’m glad you got over having read it! Do you think that someone teaching it could have said something to keep you from going through that period of sorrow?

 

[St_Francis]

I read it in college and haven’t returned to it since. It didn’t seem to me it had a lot of redeeming value, particularly since it seemed at least part of a generation of young people found a way to identify with the main character.

“Pop psychologizing” characters in literature is almost always a mistake. So let’s say Caulfield is a profoundly sick person morally and spiritually. Everybody is a “phony”. His view of reality is almost worthy of a young Taliban. He has essentially no real insight into human beings and their behavior. And he’s remorselessly judgmental and unforgiving, though he sort of forgives Antonlini at the end when Caulfield decompensates.

As a model of one of the mental pitfalls into which sometimes young people fall; as an examplar of everything wrong with the views of some young people in that era, Caulfield succeeds as a character. But to what end? Did Salinger intend Caulfield to be an exemplar of how warped young people can get when their self-righteousness and naivete is overwhelming? Or was Salinger himself the sicker of the two?

I can’t say I ever quite figured that out. We were required to write a number of papers while taking that book in a literature class on novels. I will have to say I was a contrarian to most views. But I did well grade-wise.

I hope your post encourages some more comments–you wrote what I found wrong so much better than i did

 

[Contarini]

I have never read it (I was homeschooled, and my mother was educated in Britain, so i didn’t read a lot of the standard books all American kids read). I did just read Franny and Zooey, which is a wonderful book.

Salinger, like a lot of great writers, clearly had a lot of issues. Franny and Zooey shows that he was trying to work through them and come to a healthier way of looking at the world and people. I’m not sure he succeeded, but that’s between him and God. I know that the book was a means of grace to me.

I want to read Catcher now. It may well be more depressing and less redemptive than F & Z. But I question why people complain about books being “depressing” as if that were a moral flaw. As A. E. Housman said in “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”: if you want to feel better, go get drunk (no, I’m not literally advocating drunkenness). Great literature does more than that–it makes you see the world differently.

Edwin

 

[GEddie]

That’s interesting.

Several works I read for school were far more depressing than CITR, for example, Jane Eyre..

In fact, a lot of books on my HS’ required list were either dark or dealt with tragedy: terminal illness, parental death, illegitimacy, etc. ISTM that a purpose of required reading is to expose the young to depths of feeling beyond their own experience; if the goal were to think about kids living an average life, most could hopefully examine their own life for such.

ICXC NIKA

 

[polytropos]

Do you think that someone teaching it could have said something to keep you from going through that period of sorrow?

Unfortunately, I don’t think so. I had actually read it a few years earlier too, but didn’t understand it then. When I read it in high school, it just resonated a lot with me, and I was angsty. It probably had more to do with my background than the book.

Most of my peers found the book boring and unremarkable, and they thought Caulfield was whiny.

 

[polytropos]

Several works I read for school were far more depressing than CITR, for example, Jane Eyre..

In fact, a lot of books on my HS’ required list were either dark or dealt with tragedy: terminal illness, parental death, illegitimacy, etc. ISTM that a purpose of required reading is to expose the young to depths of feeling beyond their own experience; if the goal were to think about kids living an average life, most could hopefully examine their own life for such.

There are more tragic things that occur in a lot of books, but that doesn’t necessarily make them more depressing. CITR can be “closer to home.” People die in other books, lose fortunes, take revenge, watch a loved one suffer, whatever, but all of that is very abstract and narrative. It’s also something that you can find on TV. If someone is already living a somewhat jaded and bitter life, then he might see a lot of himself in Holden Caulfield. That was my experience, at least.

 

[Contarini]

Unfortunately, I don’t think so. I had actually read it a few years earlier too, but didn’t understand it then. When I read it in high school, it just resonated a lot with me, and I was angsty. It probably had more to do with my background than the book.

Arguably Dostoyevsky had that effect on me in my late teens and 20s. But even if he did help make my young-adult angst worse, he also gave me resources for getting through it, and made me a deeper person.

Edwin

 

[polytropos]

Arguably Dostoyevsky had that effect on me in my late teens and 20s. But even if he did help make my young-adult angst worse, he also gave me resources for getting through it, and made me a deeper person.

Edwin

Yeah, Dostoyevsky probably would have had the same effect on me, had I read him earlier. Raskolnikov probably would have resonated with me more than Caulfield. I find the conclusion of Crime and Punishment more positive than the conclusion of The Catcher in the Rye, though.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Teenage angst is the operative phrase here.

If, when a teenager, you have it, you like Holden who more or less mirrors your angst.

If you’re relatively normal and well adjusted, you do find him an insufferable whiner.

Holden Caulfied reminds me of a watered down copycat version of Quentin in William Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury.