Nearly thirty years later than most people, I finally got around to reading J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. If the point of this book is to make me support the draft and sending teenagers off to get some life experience in the jungles, then mission accomplished. Because Holden Caulfield needs to spend some time doing push ups, running laps, and risking his life for a meaningful cause.
I don’t think this is just my age speaking, I’m pretty sure if I had been assigned this in Junior High like the rest of the country I’d have disliked Holden as much then as I do now. Yes, I get that he’s just a teenager and in his mopey/angsty/everything sucks age. And I get that he’s an unreliable narrator.
Even more understandable, he’s gone through a desperate family tragedy without meaningful parental guidance (shipping the kid off to a boarding school obviously isn’t the right response to the death of another child). So this is definitely a parental failure as much as anything.
That said, this book isn’t written from the parent’s perspective. We’re getting a version of Holden Caulfield’s interior life, and, well, it isn’t pretty.
The good news is, I suspect that’s the point. If The Catcher in the Rye is a kind of mirror for teenagers to highlight the less… appealing… aspects of being a teenager, maybe this isn’t such a bad book after all. That’s the same function the law serves in Scripture, though what it highlights is how we have not met the standard. This approach is the inverse of that, focusing instead on the failures rather than on perfection.
Anyway, I have now read a classic of Junior High lit which my teachers quite wisely did not assign. I’d encourage you to read it too if you haven’t, but be aware that you will not like the protagonist.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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