"People Never Notice Anything"

People Never Notice Anything, the essay on the psychological state of Holden Caulfield (the protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye), challenges the fear that many people have towards the great novel and its unsettling character. It highlights the hope in Holden Caulfield’s seemingly lost behavior. Readers of this essay who have had previous experience with The Catcher in the Rye will come away, recognizing their wrongful judgement of Caulfield’s character, and those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading it will have the great opportunity to meet the boy with fresh and unassuming eyes. The essay connects with Caulfield and seeks to understand him in an unconventional way, bringing readers to relate more closely to the troubled boy than they may care to admit. It explores Holden’s inner workings while imploring everyone to always give others the benefit of the doubt. - Micah Wallingford

“People Never Notice Anything” 

            The Catcher in the Rye became an enormous success and an extreme controversy within two weeks after being published. In the first two weeks J.D. Salinger’s novel made it to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Yet in the following years this book had been banned time after time from schools, communities and libraries, accused of “violating codes on ‘excess vulgar language, sexual scenes, things concerning moral issues, excessive violence’” and cost many teachers their jobs and reputations (Time, “Top 10 Censored Books”). For example, nine years after the novel’s release, a teacher from a school in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was fired for assigning the book as required reading to his eleventh grade class. In Ohio, a petition was started in the community of Columbus to ban the book from all the schools in the area, because the book was labeled as “antiwhite” (Time, “Top 10 Censored Books”). Several other interesting cases involved a petition to remove The Catcher in the Rye from the required reading list in 1993, in a school district in California, because it is “centered around negative activity”. And another instance in South Carolina, when two school board members banned the book from certain district schools because it “is a filthy, filthy book” (Bookczuk, CSUN, “Banned Books— The Catcher in the Rye”). There have also been individual petitions started by parents against The Catcher in the Rye. In 2004, in Pennsylvania, a mother presented at a school board meeting a signed petition to protest the assigning of Salinger’s novel. The mother, Cydney Schuch, said that she “would prefer that ‘students read about a lifestyle that exemplified better morals and values’” (Lowe, CSUN, “Banned Books— The Catcher in the Rye”).

Having read The Catcher in the Rye, I have inevitably joined the conversation about the novel and chosen a side in this heated debate. As I flipped through the pages and followed Holden through the streets of New York City, I savored the narrative, the simple and honest language and thoughts of a complex and distinctive young man. I enjoyed the novel greatly and found myself relating to Holden Caulfield, which was very surprising to me and perhaps to some of those who know me. Having realized the heated debate over The Catcher in the Rye that has been taking place for years now, I decided to analyze why I liked this novel so immensely. I searched within myself to see where and why I could relate to Holden. Reading Holden say, “People never notice anything” (Salinger, 5) when talking about himself and his age, I felt challenged to take a closer look at the main character himself, trying to peel back the layers and getting beyond his six foot stature and “bad boy” tag.

Holden Caulfield is a peculiar young man, with a very long and grim life story for his age of sixteen. When he was younger, he first handedly experienced loss and death with the passing of his younger brother Allie, he the also witnessed the suicide of a classmate of his and throughout most of the novel his parents seem pretty distant and aloof.

When we meet him he has just flunked out of the fourth boarding school in a row, gets in a fight with his roommate and leaves his school three days early. Then on a train he substantially lies to the mother of one of the boys attending his ex-school, telling her great stories about her rather grey son. When in the hotel he calls a stripper in hopes that she will agree to have sex with him although eventually he gets annoyed with the call and hangs up. However this is not the last of his escapades. He agrees to see a prostitute and promises to pay five bucks if she comes to his room, yet this time too he prefers having a conversation with the girl. Holden drinks a lot of alcohol throughout the time he is alone in the city, getting very drunk at one point.

All in all, these events point to the disturbed state of Holden’s mind. The rage he flies into when beating his roommate is a clear indication that there is something in his subconscious being suppressed and had been for a while and the moment when it broke free was the moment he attacked his roommate. Thinking back to the exposure he has had with violence and death, there are many possible theories as to what has been suppressed over the years; however none of the hypothesis point to anything healthy. His dishonesty with the mother of one the boys he knew from school suggests the fact that he is incapable of being truthful. The false emotion he expresses when telling these fictitious stories, in turn, suggest he lacks the facility for sincerity. The several attempts at having sex with random women, as well as his multiple discussions of sex and intimacy throughout the book, definitely point to the fact that Holden is in some way unfulfilled. It could be that he is just craving a connection with people, which he lost with the death of his brother and never regained as a result of his parent’s aloofness. The alcohol and drunkenness point to deep pain and confusion within Holden, which has obviously not been dealt with, thus his need to numb it with alcohol. His violent outburst, his fixation with the subject of sexuality and sexual intimacy and the excessive consumption of alcohol all add up to a very obvious verdict- Holden is a lost cause, deeply disturbed, perverted, an alcoholic with a moral compass totally off north.

However I believe this verdict would be completely wrong and there are many instances throughout the book that would support this different reading of Holden and whatever is brewing inside him. The fact that he removes himself from the situation in which he lost control and got violent, points to some sort of understanding of the situation and an understanding of himself. The fictitious stories he tells on the train, suggest that he is aware of the social norms that dictate one shouldn’t insult a child to the parent’s face and the social conduct acceptable in such an encounter with an older woman, especially a mother, because “Mothers are all slightly insane.” (Salinger, 30) The fact that he does not go through with his plan in either case with the women, in the end preferring to have a conversation with the prostitute, although still paying her for his time suggests his moral compass is not as far off north as all his other actions would suggest. Even the alcohol would point to the fact that he is hurting and that is a result of his feeling, not shutting down or shutting people out, he allows himself to feel. He is not numb to the pain and turmoil within him and, although only through alcohol acknowledges, the strife and chaos within. When seen in this light the listed above instances suggest that although hurt and confused, Holden is by no stretch of the imagination a lost cause; rather, he is doing pretty well. This “pretty well” is taking into account where he came from, what he has been through, and the fact that although he has had some guidance, much of life he had to figure out himself. I wish I could believe I could have done as well as Holden if I had started from his situation.

Another point worthy of attention when concerning the persona of Holden and his inner workings is the idea of “catcher in the rye” itself. Holden tells his younger sister, whom he loves dearly, that if he could be anything and could do anything he would like to be a person that stands in the rye and catches children as they run and fall of the cliff.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.” (Salinger, 93)

First of all, I would like to note that this dream, this idea of being there to help out kids when they need him most is one of the noblest ideas ever. The fact that this is a sixteen year old’s dream is even more notable. What amazes me the most is that Holden has this dream of “catching children” even though throughout his life, his sixteen years, there were very few people that were willing to “catch” him. Rather it seems like most adults let Holden fall, time after time. Neither his parents nor teachers seem to be there to break his fall. The adults in Holden’s life primarily act as “the observer in the rye” and “the judger in the rye.”

Holden believes this idea of him being “the catcher in the rye” is something he gets from a poem by Robert Burns, however his sister tells Holden that Burns never wrote about any “catcher in the rye” and Holden is misremembering a line from the poem, “if a body meet a body, coming through the rye.” Holden remembers the poem as saying, “if a body catch a body, coming through the rye,” which suggests that “the catcher in the rye” is a product of his own imagination. Perhaps this could be something like a Freudian slip, just in his head, not a spoken one. This in turn would suggest that Holden wishes, deep inside, that there would be someone ready to catch children when they are falling, perhaps because he saw his classmate jump out of a window and commit suicide without anyone catching him, or perhaps because he feels like he himself is in free fall ever since his brother Allie died and no one is there to break Holden’s fall.       
            If we are to add up all the points made above I believe there is more to be said about the novel than it being “a filthy, filthy book” (Bookczuk, CSUN, “Banned Books— The Catcher in the Rye”). Sure there is swearing and there is alcohol and a lot of sexual references, yet they are all true to the state of a young man who, although lost, injured and traumatized, is in search of himself, hungry for a purpose and striving to save and serve others. My deeper examination of Holden in the pages above, my analysis of his actions and words points to the fact that, although he is broken and confused, he is still emotionally developed, socially aware and his moral compass, though lapses do happen, still points north.