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Summary: i love you, holden caulfield
Review: in a period of 3 days, holden was able to express every emotion that i feel. is there anything else to be said?
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Summary: Pointless
Review: In a word, this book is pointless. I may seem like a mindless critic that hates everything, but i rarely dislike a book. I will give it one thing...it interested me, and kept me reading, but it never really got anywhere. If Holden didn't smoke a pack a day, washed his mouth out with soap, and quit hiring prostitutes, maybe he wouldn't be so depressed! I am mainly bitter about The Catcher in the Rye because i always hear how good it is, blah blah blah, so i read it, and its basically about a 16 year old kid who needs to go to a correction facility. The catcher in the rye taught me one thing: if you put seventeen cuss words on one page, your novel can be "a supreme masterpiece" too!
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Summary: Not all of us are Holden
Review: In Catcher's protrayal of a disaffected teenager, Salinger really shines. Holden never offers any reasons for his criticism and fails to recognise his massive hypocracy. But I'm speaking as someone who isn't trapped in existentialist delusions, doesn't hate his fellow human being while harboring secret hypocracies, and doesn't have psycho-sexual complexes. You really have to identify with Holden Caulfield for this book to work its magic. Otherwise it's a tale about a repetative, petulant child confronting the big, bad world and having a nervous breakdown a la Kafka -- it's hard for me to either feel sympathy for him or feel he came to his just desserts.
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Summary: This book should NOT be banned!
Review: In fact, I think kids should be forced to read it. This book portrays the negativity of community and how community is inclusive. Inclusiveness yields segregation and makes people think they have to have other people to survive and that they have to care what others think. He rejects this community, yet seeks it desparately throughout the novel. He is a sweet, sensitive kid--just like most kids this age. I have no idea why this book is forbidden. Society wants to make puppets of us all and I guess they do not want children to have brains of their own--or think that they can't think for themselves. It is beautiful. I am glad my teacher is cool and understanding enough to make me read it.
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Summary: A Brilliantly Unique Look at a Universal Problem
Review: In J.D. Salinger's brilliant coming-of-age novel, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen year old prep school adolescent relates his lonely, life-changing twenty-four hour stay in New York City as he experiences the phoniness of the adult world while attempting to deal with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie and troubling sexual experiences.Salinger, whose characters are among the best and most developed in all of literature has captured the eternal angst of growing into adulthood in the person of Holden Caulfield. Anyone who has reached the age of sixteen will be able to identify with this unique and yet universal character, for Holden contains bits and pieces of all of us. It is for this very reason that The Catcher in the Rye has become one of the most beloved and enduring works in world literature. As always, Salinger's writing is so brilliant, his characters so real, that he need not employ artifice of any kind. This is a study of the complex problems haunting all adolescents as they mature into adulthood and Salinger wisely chooses to keep his narrative and prose straightforward and simple. This is not to say that The Catcher in the Rye is a straightforward and simple book. It is anything but. In it we are privy to Salinger's genius and originality in portraying universal problems in a unique manner. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that can be loved and understood on many different levels of comprehension and each reader who experiences it will come away with a fresh view of the world in which they live. A work of true genius, images of a catcher in the rye are abundantly apparent throughout this book. While analyzing the city raging about him, Holden's attention is captured by a child walking in the street "singing and humming." Realizing that the child is singing the familiar refrain, "If a body meet a body, comin' through the rye," Holden, himself, says that he feels "not so depressed." The title's words, however, are more than just a pretty ditty that Holden happens to like. In the stroke of pure genius that is Salinger, himself, he wisely sums up the book's theme in its title. When Holden, whose past has been traumatic, to say the least, is questioned by his younger sister, Phoebe, regarding what he would like to do when he gets older, Holden replies, "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be." In this short bit of dialogue Salinger brilliantly exposes Holden's deepest desire and expounds the book's theme. Holden wishes to preserve something of childhood innocence that gets hopelessly lost as we grow into the crazy and phony world of adulthood. The theme of lost innocence is deftly explored by Salinger throughout the book. Holden is appalled when he encounters profanity scrawled on the walls of Phoebe's school, a school that he envisions protecting and shielding children from the evils of society. When Holden gives his red hunting cap to Phoebe to wear, he gives it to her as a shield, an emblem of the eternal love and protectiveness he feels for her. Near the beginning of the book, Holden remembers a girl he once knew, Jane Gallagher, with whom he played checkers. Jane, he remembers, "wouldn't move any of her kings," and action Holden realizes to be a metaphor of her naivete. When Holden hears that his sexually experienced prep school roommate had a date with Jane, he immediately starts a fight with him, symbolically protecting Jane's innocence. More sophisticated readers might question the reasons behind Holden's plight. While Holden's feelings are universal, this character does seem to be a rather extreme example. The catalyst for Holden's desires is no doubt the death of his younger brother, Allie, a bright and loving boy who died of leukemia at the age of thirteen. Holden still feels the sting of Allie's death acutely, as well as his own, albeit undeserved, guilt, in being able to do nothing to prevent Allie's suffering. The only reminder Holden has of Allie's shining but all-too-short life, is Allie's baseball mitt which is covered with poems Allie read while standing in the outfield. In a particularly poignant moment, Holden tells us that this is the glove he would want to use to catch children when they fall from the cliff of innocence. In an interesting, but trademark, Salinger twist, Holden distorts the Robert Burns poem that provides the book's title. Originally, it read, "If a body meet a body, comin' through the rye." Holden distorts the word "meet" into "catch." This is certainly not the first time Holden is guilty of distortion; indeed he is a master at it. This distortion, however, shows us how much Allie's death has affected Holden and also how much he fears his own fall from innocence, the theme that threads its way throughout the whole of the book. By this amazing book's end, we must reach the conclusion that there are times when we all need a "catcher in the rye." We are, indeed, blessed if we have one.
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Summary: Insight Into the Human Mind
Review: In J.D. Salinger's novel, Catcher in the Rye, he masters the ability to captivate a reader of any age or sex by expressing the universal voice that speaks differently to each person through his smooth, slang, stream of consciousness. From the first page on I was fascinated by the mystery of what knowledge I could absorb about myself and the world from an author who began his novel... (3) At the beginning, Salinger establishes his main character, Holden Caulfield, as a normal, saucy, teenage boy of fifteen. He speaks in first person and recounts everything he experiences through long portions of stream of consciousness. These streams of consciousness serve as dialogue from Holden directed to each individual reader, so that the reader gets the sense that they are a close, personal friend of the character. This relaxed reading relationship portrays Salinger's laid back, straight-forward style. Once the reader is on a similar level as the first person narrator, reading is fast, easy, and enjoyable. To further accommodate the reader, he writes clearly without cluttering his work with pompous words that hinder the real meaning. This simplistic speech enhances the child-like style. This emphasis on children and their innocent honesty can be seen throughout Salinger's other works. Proof from Salinger's life shows that he cares for young adults and favors them over corrupt, phony adults. In the streams of consciousness he embeds many insightful tidbits which everyone has experienced at one time or another. Since the focus of Salinger's work falls into character development, he follows a loose plot which enables him to express a teenage boy's perspective of the world of "phonies" and disappointment. The word "phony" occurs innumerable times throughout the book when Holden encounters many minor characters which serve as examples of humans fake, superficial air. He meets phonies such as Sally Hayes and Ernie which provide evidence of the sad fraud that America has become. From Holden's contempt of American's flaws, Salinger exposes the phony way of life in America during this period. In each of Holden's encounters, each person has some emotion or truth that Holden reacts to. Both the reader and Holden learn about the human nature together simultaneously. For an adult, Salinger summed up many of the unspoken concepts and feelings that many fear speaking about or just do not know exactly how to state like a true teenager. In instances where he describes the types of people he meets, such as his roommate Ackley who he says "always had to know who was going" before he committed to going himself, I found myself putting people I know into the characters in the book (47). Through all of the minor characters he meets along his journey towards awareness and satisfaction, Salinger develops one of the most memorable characters in fiction so well, that by the end of the book the reader feels as if they share a strong mental and emotional tie to Holden. Thoughts, feelings, and problems children and adults all share are illuminated from the universal voice Holden possesses. Along with the eternal voice Salinger creates, above all he completed a work of art that anyone can enjoy and take with them their whole life, and a character that mirrors their own feelings, insecurities, and personality.
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Summary: A satirical view on society
Review: In J.D. Salinger's novel, this is not just the story of pessimist Holden Caulfield but a satirical view on the current state of society and and the loss of innocence. Such is the character of Holden's dead brother Allie who sybolized the goodness that was in society which is now gone. And Pheobe-who Holden so wanted to protect and keep innocent-is what is still left that's pure and good in society and thus that's why Holden wanted her to stay exactly the way she is. The ducks in the pond that Holden was obsessed with-wondering where they went after the pond freezes over-represent the innocence of youth and the shortness of childhood. And he's wondering where it goes and why children have to enter the phony world of adulthood so fast. Holden sees this destruction of innocence which makes him the cynical and depressed kid that he is.
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Summary: A pathetic look at a jaded, phillistine med-student.
Review: In J.D. Salinger's over-hyped classic, we meet Holden Caulfied an overly sensitive, introspective, aspiring Ph.D. who goes underground in New York for two months to find enough money to finish med-school. Through several telephone conversations (the ultimate dramatic device) with his aggressive domineering father (one can only imagine the Kafka influence), we see Caulfied as an innocent lamb on the cusp of an emotional meltdown. He finds himself taking up many degrading jobs -from coroner to male escort- all in which he repeatedly and unconvincingly sees the dark side of humanity, until he ultimately finds himself in a nihilistic state of despair. Though his language may be course and even archaic by today's standards, the story, in its entirety, along with Holden himself, is not. His faux-naïf tone and attitude are unconvincing at best and utterly annoying at worst. The prototype of the cynical young adult, he has inspired generations of readers to avoid medical school -with all its 'pretense and pomposity'- and become summer camp counselors- the purported 'soul cleansing' career he ultimately chooses. We can thank this book for the surplus of unemployed camp counselors that continue to wound the economy. I think that what bothers me most about this book, is that being a med-student myself, I found the grad-school portrayed here -Pency school of medicine- to be an inaccurate, and potentially harming version of the seemingly sacred institution after which it was carelessly modeled (brief note in passing: possibly the most annoying part of the book was when he called the Pency school of medicine 'ennui-city'). Holden's dissertation on 'the correlation between alcoholism and small New England coastal communities' -as he put it- was absolutely absurd and preposterous in my opinion; almost bordering on sacrilege. My advice: skip this one kids; buy the cliff's notes.
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Summary: Catch a great book
Review: In my opinion, this is one of the best books ever written. When I started reading this book I could not put it down and I finished it within a few hours. This book is a must read for everyone.
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Summary: very funny
Review: In nearly each review of this book, people refer it as as a "classic" and "fine piece of literature," but what everyone seems to fail to mention is how very funny this book is. Holden Caulfield is one of the most amusing characters from a book that I have ever read, and there were many times while reading it that I just had to laugh a lot. For instance, who in a book would say "vomity" or "perverty" or "goddam" every five seconds? People say these things in real life, but writers rarely ever catch it. It seems in every page, Holden says some smartass remark that is very amusing, and that is the best part of the book. If he wasn't as sarcastic and both self-loathing and self-loving as he was, I'm not sure that the book could even stand to be read from just the storyline alone. This is one of the funniest books I have ever read -- definitely a page-turner -- and has renewed my interest in reading. Usually when I read the book, I am curious about the author, yet in this case, the dialogue and writing were so catchy that I was mostly just interested in Holden. This is a funny sort of American book with an American humour, and is definitely worthy of a read.
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