The Catcher in the Rye by Cristian Guerrero C.

The transition from Childhood to Adulthood.

Even when The Catcher in the Rye was written in an extremely cautious way, a way that tries 
to convey a sense of connection between us and Holden Caulfield, and it also tries to create 
a feeling of empathy where we can almost be in his shoes, it didn’t make me feel in that
way. 

 It was not my case, because while I was reading every passage of the novel I was constantly 
thinking “he is just the typical teenager with the typical crisis where they hate everything and 
everyone but at the same time they are doing whatever is possible to fit in a place and find 
their identity”.  Personally I think the reason that this novel didn’t connect me to the
 protagonist was mainly for me age. 

 Even though when I was 17 I really feel exactly the same things that Holden felt, such as the
 loss of a beloved one, depression, loneliness, identity problems, and of course sex and
 sexuality, the current me, as a 23 years old young adult, I have already surpassed all those
 crisis and Holden to me is just a very emotional and sensitive boy that doesn’t want to 
become a “phony”, or in other words, an adult that is part of the annoying and corrupted 
society.

 Since the main “plot” of The Catcher in the Rye –if you can call it plot- develops around
 Holden’s fear and crisis of not becoming adult since for him, the “innocence” of childhood
 is the best thing a human being can have. Therefore, this “plot” is the huge umbrella that
 includes all the metaphors that are hidden in the little messages of story and I would recall
 them and explain them. 

 The first one, the most obvious and easily recognizable is related to his red hunting cap. 
Since he describes that when he is wearing it, he feel protected, this “protection” is attributed
 to the fact that he is hiding the grey hairs growing on his head; the metaphor is that he is 
protecting himself to the signs of become older.

 Now, the second metaphor related to his hunting cap, is when he turns his cap backwards,
 and he says that that is how he manifests against the society –doing the opposite-. 
With this in mind, do you know how catchers in baseball look like?

 This is a clearly reference to the metaphor that explains the title of the novel and it’s also 
related the glove of his dead brother, because he was also a catcher.

 The metaphor which explains the title of the novel is quite simple, since he says that he sees
 himself standing at the end of a cliff preventing children who are playing in a field of rye
 from falling off the cliff. You don’t have to think too much to realize that he is not preventing
 the kids just from falling, he is preventing them to fall into the adulthood abyss; he visualizes
 himself saving the childhoods of those kids.

 I would like to refer to all other metaphors hidden in the novel but for the sake of words, I 
will go straight to last one, which is for me the most interesting and difficult to comprehend. 

 At the end of the novel when Holden is at the zoo with his little sister Phoebe, watching her
 having fun at the merry-go-round, he explains that he is so happy that he could even cry, and
 we as readers understand that he is happy, because he is finally sharing a happy time with 
another person, showing us an evolution in his personality and his mental state of loneliness
 and isolation. However, the hidden secret in this, is that Holden finally understand that life
 is not an straight line in life where you go from childhood to adulthood without having any 
possibilities to do something in order avoid it, because what really happens, is that you go in 
circles through life, going back and forward between those 2 stages, you don’t transition to 
adulthood leaving your childhood behind, you don’t live with the fear of losing something 
while growing and advancing to the future, because you keep it, and your life is always cycling.
 You CAN be an adult and keeping your childhood at the same time. This is the major fear
 that torments Holden in the whole novel, becoming an adult and losing his innocence, but is
 at this point, that he finally realizes how life works.

 In relation to the fear of life, fear of living in the world, I would like to related to this video 
expressing a  kind of “philosophical idea”, by Eduardo Galeano – who was an Uruguayan
 journalist,  writer and novelist and was consider “a literary giant of the Latin American left”.

 Personally I think his vision fits perfect to the concept proposed in The Catcher in the Rye because
 it express exactly what the protagonist feels and his description of society and childhood. 
For instance, people have always criticized what they can and what they cannot do, but is 
society –the corrupted society- the one that transform and manipulates the way people think.
 In addition, this happen since we are children, due to the reason that  even when they are
 born with this innocence –the one that Holden wants to protects and preserve-,  they are 
unfairly influenced by society (a.k.a. adults), and they sadly become part of this adult world.

So what do you think about Galeano’s vision of the world, do you agree with him or do you
 find it too dramatic? Leave your opinions in the comments and let’s start a discussion!