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I taught literature at a Catholic high school for 20 years. I found fictional literature a most excellent vehicle for young adults to discuss, analyze, and assimilate moral values. In fact, no work of non-fiction literature can take its place. I used the Introduction to Great Books, mostly comprised of non-fiction essays, also to delve into moral questions. They are equally important, but there is no replacing imaginative works.

Every so often on FR there comes the Catcher in the Rye thread, like clockwork. Because I taught it for many years, with excellent results, I can say that I know it very well, but I realize few have had the benefit of decoding it as I have. Like The Great Gatsby, which is an absolutely dazzling conglomeration of symbolism, putting it among our greatest novels, Catcher shares an intricate use of powerful symbols, but not with the complexity that Fitzgerald created. But Salinger's work is a loving, tender exploration of a search for God in a hostile, hypocritical world. He shows that the perversion of a worldly frigid materialism is combated and ultimately conquered by other-centered love, which comes from God. The bullets in the gut, the hunter's hat, the ducks, the pond, the merry-go-round, the museum, Phoebe, Christmas profanation, the nuns, the Rockettes, Sunny the prostitute, Maurice the pimp, Jane, etal all are assembled with great symbolic skill by Salinger, product of Catholic and Jewish parents, to convey that theme of God's love and human love and heaven as our destiny (quest) as antidote. And it's a hell of a funny book, it really is.

Thank you for an excellent review. Maybe I’ll try reading it again one of these days. I think I was too young the first time around.

I taught literature at a Catholic high school for 20 years. I found fictional literature a most excellent vehicle for young adults to discuss, analyze, and assimilate moral values. In fact, no work of non-fiction literature can take its place.

Plutarch, Josephus, Plato, Gibbon and Churchill can't be used to discuss and analyze moral values?

Beg to differ.

I don’t know about “Rye” as a search for God. Wasn’t Salinger a Buddhist, if anything? That has very little connection to the search for God, or one that a Catholic would find enlightening, except that it is “spiritual.” I don’t find it nihilistic like some.

Salinger’s favorite tactic, or among them, is to suggest a truth beyond expression, and to present silence as the greatest expression of wisdom, or something like that. Which makes for bad literature in my opinion. It is trying desperately hard to be more profound than you’re actually capabilities. Which is a problem of symbolism, and why I choke on it. Because not always but often they want it to do the work for them.

“Gatsby” and “Lord of the Flies,” for instance, are much better. There the symbolism is simple and incorporated into the story itself, instead of a decoder ring that gives you extra special knowledge a cursory reading can’t. Which doesn’t mean a book should only mean what you can catch the first go around. But it should be in there, somewhere. Not like “Catcher,” which must be saved from banality by knowledge which passeth show.

Thanks. I did not read it until I was in my thirties, and
have reread it 5 or 6 times. I love Holden for figuring
out phoniness in society and becoming enraged when he sees the f-word scrawled where his kid sister could see it.

And every now and then, I’ll call someone a crumb-bum.