Along with “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield turns 75 today, July 16. That’s a long time for anyone to remain a 17
Along with “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield turns 75 today, July 16. That’s a long time for anyone to remain a 17-year-old, but Holden, a New Yorker through and through, has, like Huck Finn, defied going out of date.
As a college teacher, I am never surprised by students who have read “The Catcher in the Rye” before they get to my class. Salinger’s novel is assigned reading in high schools across the country as well as a book of choice for many students before they get to high school.
The question I ask myself is whether Holden can continue to be as meaningful to students as he was to me growing up at a time when adults were made uneasy just by Holden’s way of speaking.
Today’s “anxious generation,” as Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) has been labelled, faces a social world very different from Holden’s by virtue of having Instagram, TikTok, and smart phones as constants in their daily lives.
Holden, by contrast, seeks out alone time. He feels free to trust his own intuitions and to test himself with constant reading. As he jokingly puts it, “I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.” “The Catcher in the Rye” is filled with Holden’s references to authors as different as Thomas Hardy and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he has read with great seriousness.
This seriousness is consistent with Holden’s deepest feelings. He worries more about others than himself. He even worries about the ducks in Central Park surviving the winter once the lagoon they live in freezes over.
When Holden’s 10-year-old sister asks him what he wants to do when he grows up, he tells her he wants to be a catcher in the rye and save children like those in Robert Burns’ poem “Comin’ Thro the Rye” from falling off a cliff. And when a teacher tells Holden life is a game, he thinks about what it means to be on the losing side in the game. “If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game all right — I’ll admit that,” he sarcastically says to himself.
Holden’s favorite word is “phony.” He applies it liberally to those he thinks are frauds. When “The Catcher in the Rye” was published, a reviewer for The New Yorker, assured readers Holden’s harsh judgments would not last into adulthood. “He will even become more tolerant of phonies — it is part of the mechanics of living,” the reviewer concluded.
But in “The Catcher in the Rye” Holden gives no indication that he is going to be tolerant of phonies in the future. Despite being kicked out of four schools, Holden never promises he is going to “apply himself” in his next school. “I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it?” he asks.
Holden isn’t trying to be evasive about what is in store for him. He is just claiming for himself the right to be a work in progress, a claim that makes as much sense for a 17-year-old today as it did in 1951 for Holden.
I don’t expect my students to identify with Holden the same way I did. Why should they follow my example? It is enough, I think, that many of my students find echoes of Holden’s thinking in their own. He reminds them that there is honor in distrusting those in authority, even the president, when they ask us to live in a world where threats and bullying are the norm.
Nicolaus Mills is author of “The Triumph of Meanness: America’s War Against its Better Self.” He is co-chair of the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College.
