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The Catcher in the Rye

“The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one”

This for sure is the one of the best thing that I can take away from this book. This quote provoked thought, so did a lot of the book, and I must say it’s very true and it perhaps has more to offer than it seems like, just spare a thought. Well, I can say “It killed me”, just as Mr. Salinger’s protagonist; Holden exclaims so often.

To tell the truth, this book isn’t as depressing as it is described in thousands of reviews on the internet. I always make sure I read the negative comments on Amazon before  I choose a book to read. A negative user review of “The Catcher in the Rye“ described this book to be so depressing that the reader couldn’t pursue any further and had to give up reading it. In my opinion, that is quite an overstatement.

Well, the plot is designed that way; a teenage boy just expelled from school spends a day without friends and trying to stay away from his parents and meets some strange people and incidents along the way. Almost every teenager I know is the same, perhaps so was I when I was a teenager – rebellious, angry, believe you have got all life figured out etc. Holden isn’t too different. He is rebellious, he disapproves the phony society and its people; he is supremely confident how he could lead his life by getting away and picking up a job, his dilemmas, his state of mind. He is expelled and is trying to escape from his parents who naturally would be furious. He’s been drinking, smoking and is lonely and trying to beat it. That’s it. I don’t see this extremely depressing; I would say this perhaps is more or less something that everyone can relate to, of course in accordance to their own emotional magnitudes.

It is a very good book, I liked it a lot. It’s almost a cliché now in reviews of this book but I would yet say it again – I would have loved to read this book when I was a teenager.

This is a book has been a part of the American curriculum for quite some time now and it also is one of the books that has been analyzed and reviewed the most. I learnt this when I was researching about this book before I picked it up to read. Well I wouldn’t lie, one of the first reasons I heard about this book and decided to read it was because of its controversial John Lennon connection. Later, I found out it indeed was a classic.

I was curious to know how this book would be analyzed and interpreted and so it drove me to foray into many student forums, discussion threads where there were detailed character plots, assignments and deep analysis of small details in the book and some beautiful metaphors I had missed when I read it. For instance, Holden keeps wondering where the ducks would go when the lake is frozen but in fact he is trying to escape from a place where he doesn’t fit in or Holden’s hunting hat which he used to “shoot” people.

Just read the book. I bet you will like it.