Posted on 06/22/2024 2:08:31 PM PDT by DFG
The 1951 J.D. Salinger novel The Catcher in the Rye has long been one of the most controversial literary tomes, inspiring films and criminal conspiracies. John Lennon’s murderer, Marc David Chapman, carried the book at the murder and continued reading it while Lennon lay bleeding at his feet. He has said that he wished to model his life after the novel's protagonist, Holden Caulfield, identifying with Holden’s misanthropic world view.
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There have been numerous books, podcasts, and lectures positing even more outlandish schemes emanating from the pen of Jerome David Salinger. One of the most amusing was a three part video on YouTube showing the hidden ‘Catcher’ symbols in Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining.
When I was 16, I read The Catcher in the Rye and loved it for all the wrong reasons. After a discussion about the book with my husband who wasn’t a fan, I decided to reread it as an adult and found it overwhelmingly relevant to today and understood finally why it’s a classic.
As a teenager, I could not identify with the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, and his angst-driven search for life’s answers. I was in my 12th year of an all-girls Catholic education and had all the tools I needed to deal with trauma and the vicissitudes of urban strife. Poor Holden had nothing to stop his depression and painful search for relevance in his scary impending adulthood. What we did have in common was the fact that we were native New Yorkers and what I loved about Catcher was the description of Holden’s trek into the Manhattan sites I had also escaped to from life in the barrio. I lived in the museums of Art and Natural History. I rode the carousel in my beloved playground of Central Park.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Chapman was an a-hole, but Lennon was a phony if you really want to know the truth.
Chapman, HInkley and his father are all connected!
I didn’t think Catcher in the Rye was good literature when I read (most of) it when I was a teenager in the ‘60’s. It hasn’t aged well, despite what Colon might propose in her reasonably interesting article.
Holden’s 10 year old sister wanting to run away with him. I didn’t get it. She said he screwed up.
It’s been 35 years since I read it. But I remember Holden calling many people ‘phonies’. I grew to agree with this part of his misanthropic seeming literature.
John had an incredibly authentic singing voice by any measure. Go listen to In My Life. Go listen to Julia the song on the white album. If it doesn’t move you then you’ll know you’re a true musical retard.
I was never impressed with the book. Not when I was required to read it, and not when I read it on my own to revisit it, thinking I might not have been mature enough to understand it the first time I read it.
I just didn’t care for it.
I contrast it with “The Great Gatsby”, which ALSO engendered a degree of boredom and apathy when I first read it when I was forced to when I was young, then, when I read it again as an adult, I viewed it wholly differently, and enjoyed it greatly.
I get that too. But I have also come to realize that is a common human failing. Everyone has the potential to either be phony or appear phony at some point, and taking it beyond that shows a degree of immaturity in the observer.
Granted, we all dislike people who are phony all the time-the superior who gives you flat praise but actually could not care less, the person who tries hard to appear superior to what he actually is, and so on.
But we deal with it. We don’t obsess on it like people do today about nearly everything. Well centered people are capable of shrugging their shoulders and saying “Yeah. He’s a phony. I just don’t care to interact with him in any way.”
Any book I was forced to read in high school I didn’t like. It wasn’t until I got out of college before I read books for the sake of reading. I remember we had to read CITR and Native Son back to back. Talk about boring. And Oliver Twist, Yech. So many ‘phonies’ try to read so much in to a book about some deep meaning or profound discovery when it is for entertainment. I was at an art gallery in Lahaina and a surprise guest,
Artist, Anthony Hopkins was there giving a presentation. Some egghead phony asked, “Sir Anthony, (were in America you snob” what are the meanings behind these paintings. (They were all very amusing and strange portraits.)
He said, “I just like painting. Why does there have to be some hidden meaning behind everything.?”
Reagan liked him.
He wasn’t a phony singer/songwriter by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, maybe I’ll give The Great Gatsby another try. I read it almost 50 years ago (not as a reading assignment) and thought it was a lot of nothing. People I didn’t care about, or even like, doing nothing interesting.
As for Catcher in the Rye, I read it a couple of times, once when I was about ten and again in high school. I picked up a copy last year but haven’t got around to rereading it. I actually kind of liked a few of Salinger’s short stories way back when.
“Any book I was forced to read in high school I didn’t like.”
Agreed—and today I own thousands of books—more than my small town’s library.
Their attempt to make me hate reading failed.
:-)
It’s grossly overrated
In my youth we called phonies “plastic people”
“I didn’t think Catcher in the Rye was good literature when I read (most of) it when I was a teenager in the ‘60’s.”
i read it as an adult because of all the hoopblah, and concluded i had wasted my time reading it ...
As a Southerner in the early 1980's I attended a class in the ITT building in Manhattan for a few weeks when I worked for ITT USTS. I stayed in the Algonquin Hotel and on the weekend I walked from Battery Park back up to midtown. The day before I flew home I saw a notice on a utility pole that said Itzhak Perlman would appear in a small chamber music event the next week, proving that NYC was the center of the world.
Even with that effort to connect with NYC, I could not relate to Holden Caulfield. All of the heartache and angsts that J. D. Salinger put the kid through seemed forced and fake. There was not a single thing in the book that made me identify with any of the characters. For a book written before I was born and was claimed to be a classic, it was the epitome of hype.
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