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.
Personally, I think most “symbolism” in literature is made-up garbage to torture students and make a book seem deeper than it really is. For instance, a lot of people try to find “symbolism” in Dickens and miss the fact that he was getting paid by the word...
I am just glad I missed Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick, and Gatsby. Give me Heinlein, PC Wren, and John Buchan, any day.
Many good posts on this thread so far. I ‘m posting to you because of your well-written second and third paragraphs in this post.
I read Catcher before it was a very big-deal but preferred Salinger’s other stories (F&Z, RHTRC&SAI). Many a college thesis was written about some aspect of Salinger’s books in the ‘60s, for sure. Never wanted to track him down and have a conversation with him, as a girlfriend tried to do.
Fifteen years later, I began to realize how profoundly my thinking and reasoning had been negatively altered by his efforts. Salinger’s works may have been worth studying, but not from a liberal college professor’s POV.
Lord knows how I ever came to think as a conservative again.