The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most influential American novels published in the mid-twentieth century. Upon its publication in 1951, J. D. Salinger's only full-length novel became something of a cult, helping to inspire the Crush Generation and powerfully capturing a moment in American cultural history. Salinger had worked on the manuscript for a number of years: he had drafts of The Catcher in the Rye in his backpack when he fought at D-Day in 1944.

Simply why did The Catcher in the Rye go such a cult classic, and why does it remain and so widely revered and studied? Before we offer an assay of the novel, here's a brief recap of its plot.

The Catcher in the Rye : plot summary

The novel is narrated by 16-twelvemonth-old Holden Caulfield, who has been expelled from his elite school, Pencey Prep, for not doing any work. He visits his history teacher, Mr Spencer, at his dwelling house where the instructor is unwell. Withal, Mr Spencer annoys Holden when he wants to go through the trunk's mistakes and then he tin can learn why he has failed.

Holden so goes back to his dorm room, where another student, Ackley, and Holden's roommate Stradlater plow up. Holden learns that Stradlater has a appointment with a girl he had fallen in love with the previous year, simply agrees to write an English composition for his roommate so Stradlater has his evening complimentary to go on the appointment. However, later that evening when Stradlater returns from his engagement, Holden grows jealous, and the 2 of them fight, with Holden losing.

Although he is supposed to remain at the boarding school until the end of term, Holden decides to accept off immediately, travelling to New York on the train with the mother of 1 of his classmates; he entertains her (and himself) by making upward outlandish stories about how popular her son is at school. Then he checks into a hotel in New York, because he wants to avoid going habitation and telling his parents he has been expelled.

He visits a nightclub, and, back at his hotel room, arranges for a prostitute named Sunny to come to his room. But when the virginal Holden reveals he merely wants to talk to her, she leaves, returning with her pimp, who demands more coin from him before attacking him, while Sunny takes money out of Holden'south wallet. To cheer himself upward the next day, Holden phones a girl he knows named Sally Hayes, and, even though he considers her a phoney, they arrange to run into a play at the theatre. It is while he is on his style to meet Sally, while purchasing a tape for his sister Phoebe, that Holden hears a boy singing 'If a trunk take hold of a body coming through the rye'. After the play, Holden and Sally get ice skating, but Holden scares Sally away past suggesting they get and live in the woods.

Side by side, Holden meets Carl Luce, an old schoolfriend, for a potable in a bar. Once once again, Holden ends up abrasive someone, this time past taking an unusual level of interest in Carl'due south love life. Holden gets drunk and goes to Central Park, before going home to come across Phoebe, avoiding alerting his parents to the fact he has returned. Phoebe works out that Holden is home because he's been expelled from school, and Holden tells Phoebe his dream of existence 'the catcher in the rye' (of which more below).

Holden escapes the family home when his parents arrive dorsum at the firm, and goes to visit another former teacher of his, Mr Antolini, who taught him English language. Antolini is worried about Holden and, like Mr Spencer, wants Holden to focus and make something of himself. He does, however, let Holden stay the night, though things take a dark plough when Holden wakes up to discover Mr Antolini patting his head and interprets this as an inappropriate advance. He leaves, passing the rest of the nighttime at Chiliad Cardinal Station.

The side by side mean solar day, he decides to leave social club and go and live in seclusion in a log cabin. When Phoebe hears of his plan, she wants to go with him, simply Holden refuses to let her. He takes her to the zoo and buys her a ride on the carousel to make it up to her, and the two share a happy moment. The novel ends with Holden confiding to u.s. that he has met with his parents and agreed to start at a new school in September. The cursory holiday, the youthful rebellion, is over.

The Catcher in the Rye : analysis

The opening lines of the novel see Holden Caulfield, and Salinger through him, signalling a departure from and rejection of the kind of nineteenth-century Bildungsroman novel charting one young grapheme's journey from childhood into adulthood. Caulfield also doesn't want to join the ranks of adulthood – he views adults as more 'phoney' and suspicious than most children – and instead wishes to preserve the innocence of childhood, every bit the novel's title makes clear (of which more than in a moment).

Only if Caulfield turns away from the Victorian novel embodied by Dickens'due south David Copperfield, Salinger'southward novel does look back to a different nineteenth-century literary tradition – only an American one rather than British. Every bit critics have often remarked, The Catcher in the Rye shares some useful parallels with Marking Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the novel which Ernest Hemingway named as the beginning of American literature.

Similar Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield (his very name containing a number of faint echoes of Twain's grapheme's proper noun) narrates his own story in his own idiom, using a colloquial and downwardly-to-earth tone to document his retreat from the gild around him. Simply whereas Finn heads into the gratis world of nature, Caulfield retreats further into the city, burrowing into New York with its vices and dangers. He wishes to seek out the real city – not the 'phoney' world he has inhabited until now.

At the same time, Caulfield is more of a romantic than a realist: he dreams of escaping the modern urban center in favour of a simple, honest rustic life, a cabin in the woods (a very Walden-inspired dream), and the love of a good woman. Like the Romantic movement – seen in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge – he privileges childhood innocence over the fallen world of adulthood, and seems to think information technology'due south a shame that anyone has to grow up at all. And this is the explanation behind the novel's title: Caulfield's (largely imaginary) take on a line from a Robert Burns verse form, 'Comin' thro' the Rye', which prompts him to envision a field of rye well-nigh a cliff, where his chore would be to take hold of any children playing in the field and straying too close to the cliff-edge – hence The Catcher in the Rye.

Merely his idyllic vision of perpetual babyhood is founded on a misunderstanding: Phoebe points out to him that he has misremembered (or rather, misheard) the line from Burns's verse form, which actually asks, 'Gin [i.e., if] a body come across a body / Comin thro' the rye', rather than if a trunk catch a trunk, which is how Caulfield heard the line rendered when he heard the male child singing it earlier that twenty-four hours.

When he visits Phoebe'south school to say goodbye, he is charmingly just also puritanically offended that a swearword has been scrawled on the walls, corrupting the innocence of childhood. The trouble with Holden's character – which, thanks to Salinger'southward masterly control of the teenager's voice, is engaging and authentic – is that he thinks all adults are somehow bottom than children, and his belief in the primacy of childhood leads him to reduce adults to 'phonies' and teachers who don't empathize him. In his two encounters with his former teachers – whom, suggestively, he seeks out himself, implying that on some level he wants them to prepare him on the right path to maturity – he views the first as abrasive and the 2d as a possible sex predator. His innocence is appealing only likewise, as innocence is always in danger of being, founded on an overly simplistic view of the earth.

The late, great literary critic Frank Kermode once described The Catcher in the Rye as having a 'built-in expiry wish', and a Freudian analysis of Salinger's novel might analyse Caulfield's desire to flee from developed society with its responsibilities and challenges into an earlier childhood stage of innocence as symptomatic of his unconscious desire to return to the womb. He appears to envy his dead blood brother, Allie, to an unwholesome degree. And that title, The Catcher in the Rye, is emblematic of the novel equally a whole, since Holden's fantasy of communicable children before they fall off a cliff might exist analysed as a symbol of his desire to prevent himself, and other children, from falling off the cliff off childhood into the abyss of adulthood, with all of its phoniness and, yes, responsibilities.

Image: Ryan McGuire via Wikimedia Commons.