Jerome David Salinger Catcher in the Rye
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Jerome David Salinger Catcher in the Rye
Something about the author and his life:American novelist and short story writer. Salinger published one novel and several short story collections between 1948-59. His best-known work is THE CATCHER IN THE RYE ( 1951), a story about a rebellious teenage schoolboy and his quixotic experiences in New York. "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though." (Holden Caulfied in The Catcher in the Rye)
J.D. Salinger was born and grew up in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, New York. He was the son of a prosperous Jewish importer of Kosher cheese and his Scotch-Irish wife. In his childhood the young Jerome was called Sonny. The family had a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue. After restless studies in prep schools, he was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy (1934-36), which he attended briefly. His friends from this period remember his sarcastic wit. When he was eighteen and nineteen, Salinger spent five months in Europe in 1937. From 1937 to 1938 he studied at Ursinus College and New York University. He fell in love with Oona O'Neill, wrote her letters almost daily, and was later shocked when she married Charles Chaplin, who was much older than she. In 1939 Salinger took a class in short story writing at Columbia University under Whit Burnett, founder-editor of the Story Magazine. During World War II he was drafted into the infantry and was involved in the invasion of Normandy. Salinger's comrades considered him very brave, a genuine hero. During the first months in Europe Salinger managed to write stories and meet in Paris Ernest Hemingway. He was also involved in one of the bloodiest episodes of the war in Hürtgenweald, an useless battle, where he witnessed the horrors of war. In his celebrated story 'For Esmé - With Love and Squalor' Salinger depicted a fatigued American soldier. He starts correspondence with a thirteen-year-old British girl, which helps him to get a grip of life again. Salinger himself was hospitalized for stress according to his biographer Ian Hamilton. After serving in the Army Signal Corps and Counter-Intelligence Corps from 1942 to 1946, he devoted himself to writing. He played poker with other aspiring writers, but was considered sour and he won all the time.
He considered Hemingway and Steinbeck second rate writers but praised Melville. In 1945 Salinger married a French woman named Sylvia - she was a doctor. They were divorced and in 1955 Salinger married Claire Douglas, the daughter of the British art critic Robert Langton Douglas. The marriage ended in divorce in 1967, when Salinger's retreat into his private world and Zen Buddhism only increased. Salinger's early short stories appeared in such magazines as Story, where his first story was published in 1940, Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, and then in the New Yorker, which published almost all of his later texts. In 1948 appeared 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish', which introduced Seymour Glass, who commits suicide. It was the earliest reference to the Glass family, whose stories would go on to form the main corpus of his writing. The 'Glass cycle' continued in the collections FRANNY AND ZOOEY (1961), RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS (1963) and SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION (1963). Several of the stories are narrated by Buddy Glass. 'Hapworth 16, 1924' is written in the form of a letter from summer camp, in which the seven-year-old Seymour draws a portrait of him and his younger brother Buddy. "When I look back, listen back, over the half-dozen or slightly more original poets we've had in America, as well as the numerous talented eccentric poets and - in modern times, especially - the many gifted style deviates, I feel something close to a conviction that we have only three or four very nearly nonexpendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few." (from Seymour, An Introduction)
Twenty stories published in Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and New Yorker between 1941 and 1948 appeared in a pirated edition in 1974, THE COMPLETE UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF J.D. SALINGER (2 vols.). Many of them reflect Salinger's own service in the army. Later Salinger adopted Hindu-Buddhist influences. He became an ardent devotee of The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna, a study of Hindu mysticism, which was translated into English by Swami Nikhilananda and Joseph Campbell.
Salinger's first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, became immediately a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and gained a huge international success. It sells still some 250 000 copies annually. Salinger did not do much to help publicity, and asked that his photograph is not used in connection with the book. "Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything.
(Even praise, I happily suspect.) (from Seymour - An Introduction, 1963)
First reviews of the work were mixed, although most critics considered it brilliant. The novel took its title from a line by Robert Burns, in which the protagonist Holden Caulfied misquoting it sees himself as a 'catcher in the rye' who must keep the world's children from falling off 'some crazy cliff'. The story is written in a monologue and in lively slang. It tells about 16-year old restless Caulfield - as Salinger in his youth - who runs away from school during his Christmas break to New York to find himself and lose his virginity. He spends an evening going to nightclubs, has an unsuccessful encounter with a prostitute, and meets next day an old girlfriend. After getting drunk he sneaks home. Holden's former schoolteacher makes homosexual advances to him. He meets his sister to tell her that he is leaving home and has a nervous breakdown. The humor of the novel places it in the tradition of Mark Twain's classical works, The Adventures of Hucleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but its world view is more disillusioned. Holden describes everything as 'phoney', is constantly in search of sincerity and represented the early hero of adolescent angst. Rumors spread from time to time, that Salinger will publish another novel, or that he publishes his work under a pseudonym, perhaps such as Thomas Pynchon. From late 60's he has avoided publicity. Journalists have assumed, that because he doesn't give interviews, he has something to hide. In 1961 Time Magazine sent a team of reporters to investigate his private life. "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure," said Salinger in 1974 to a New York Times correspondent. However, according to Joyce Maynard, who was close to the author for a long time from the 1970s, Salinger still writes, but nobody is allowed to see the work. Maynard was eighteen when she reveived a letter from the author, and after an intense correspondence Maynard moved in with the author. Ian Hamilton's unauthorized biography of Salinger was rewritten, when the author did not accept extensive quoting of his personal letters. The new version, In Search of J.D. Salinger, appeared in 1988. In 1992 a fire broke out in Salinger's Cornish house, but he managed to flee from the reporters who saw an opportunity to interview him. Since the late 80s Salinger has been married to Colleen O'Neill.
Maynard's story of her relationship with Salinger, At Home in the World, appeared in October 1998.
Main characters:
Holden Caulfield – 16-year-old boy, who has never been really interested in school. Actually he has almost always flunked all his subjects and now he has been kicked out of the school for the third time. He has no ambitions to life. He complains about the world and people around him a lot. He feels nobody (except maybe his little sister Phoebe) understands him and that he doesn’t understand others.He pretends to be someone else. He acts as if he were “a tough guy”, but in reality he is very sensitive. You can tell just by the things he is talking about. He concerns himself with such details that might be insignificant to others. On the other hand, he finds things that are serious for other people funny, because he sees the irony of it. He seems quite intelligent (even though his vocabulary is limited), but sometimes he acts as if he were younger. He asks needless questions and gives childish arguments. (For example when he asks the taxi driver where the ducks go when the lake freezes over)
He is rebellious but he still obeys some rules of good behavior. He swears a lot; however. Phoebe Caulfield – Holdens younger sister. She is only 10 years old but very mature. She is the only one who understands Holden and wants him to start think about his future life more. She is very cute and only in her company Holden doesn’t feel he has to hide behind the mask of “though guy”. When he is with Phoebe he is himself.
Minor characters:
Ward Strandlater – Holdens roommate at Pencey. He is older and bigger then Holden. He is obsessed with himself. He is also very opinionated. You have to agree with him all the time. He likes to date girls but he seems to only look forward to use them for sex. Robert Ackley – He lives next-door to Holden at Pencey. He is very messy and looks messy. He is quite strange because he seems to enjoy annoying people by his disgusting behavior. Jane Gallagher - She’s been Holdens friend since couple of years ago. She is really nice. Plot:
This novel is a first person narrative novel. The main character Holden Caulfield tells the novel. The first few chapters are about how the private school he attended “Gave him the axe.” for not applying himself in his classes after several warnings.
Holden was pretty upset about the whole deal because he knew that his parents would be disappointed with him for getting kicked out of another school.
That same night Holden got onto a fight with his roommate, now very angry Holden leaves the school earlier than he is supposed to.
He catches a train to the city around eleven at night though can’t go home yet because his parents don’t know that he got the axe yet and he doesn’t fell like telling them just yet so he decides to stay in a hotel until his parents expect him home for Christmas vacation.
When he arrives in the city he hops on a cab to a cheesy hotel for the night and as he is alone in his room he feels lonely and sort of depressed so he goes to the bar in the hotel for a drink. All the people in the bar make him even more depressed so he decides to call it a night. On the way to his room, in the elevator the elevator attendant offers to send him up a hooker for the night. Being a virgin Holden decides to take him up on the hooker. Once the hooker makes it up to his room he gets cold feet and decides not to have sex with her and just talk. The hooker gets mad at Holden for wasting her time and leaves. Minutes later the hooker’s pimp comes looking for money and eventually ends up beating up Holden.
The following day Holden calls up an old girlfriend Sally Hues for a date. On the date they get into a minor argument with each other and Holden actually tells her that she is a “pain in the ass.” That was the end of that date.
That night Holden meets an old friend at the bar and gets very, very drunk and realizes that he has spent all his money and is very depressed. He has no place to go nobody to talk to and he feels really crumby he even mentioned dying. His only other choice was to sneak home and see his sister then leave in the morning. When he gets there his little sister soon figures out that he was kicked out of school and gets mad at him because she is scared that their father will be very mad at him.
After he left his house he called his old teacher Mr.Antolini and he invited him over to talk. Finally Mr.Antolini invited him for the night. They talked for a while longer, and then Holden went to sleep on the couch. A few hours later he was woken up by Mr.Antolini lying in the floor beside him with his hand on Holden’s cheek, it scared the pants off of him; he thought he was being perverted so he left in a hurry.
Holden wandered around aimlessly for a while thinking about running away to a place where nobody knew him and he wouldn’t have to interact with others. He is getting extremely depressed and doesn’t have any direction on what he is going to do with himself.
Holden decides he is going to see his sister then hitch hike west. While waiting for his sister to get out of school for lunch Holden almost vomits and has a terrible headache. He passed out at the museum where he was waiting for his sister.
After his sister finished giving him hell for trying to run away he decided to stay at home and he even found his smile.
Review (my opinion):
I enjoyed reading this book. It is written in everyday English with some usage of slang, which makes it quite easy to read.
Right from the beginning I forgot it was written by J.D.Salinger, because I felt as if it were all written by Holden himself. The author gives you a clear idea of what is going on in Holdens mind.
My favourite character was Phoebe. She seems to be really cute, but serious at the same time. I liked the part where she’s walking on the other side of the street to show she disagrees with Holden. That gives her character.
I think this book is easy to read and I would like to recomend it to read.