Impressions about "The Catcher in the Rye"

To start off, Holden Cauldfield is a 16-year-old boy telling his own story. Primarily, he says he doesn’t want to talk about his family or about his lousy childhood. He starts the story when he considered that his life changed. It begins with him saying ‘good-by’ to one of his teachers, even when he flunked that subject he didn’t want that his teacher would feel bad.

What caught my attention was the style of writing of the book. Holden is telling the story in first person and it seems like he is directly talking to the reader, but it is interrupted by himself telling his thoughts, including the repetition of many words such as ‘boy’ and ‘sunovabitch’; and that gave me the impression I was reading a jerk. But, while I went beyond in the reading I realized Holden wasn’t that stupid. He was childlike but he wasn’t a bad person. There were few moments in his life that made him be like that; so rude and so depressed. But most important, he was trying to be truthful in a world of phonies. And this is another thing I think is remarkable: Holden was conscious that sometimes he may be what he criticized. He described himself as a phony too. But in the reading I could see he only was looking for finding himself.

In some way I could relate this to ‘Mirror’ by Sylvia Plath, in the sense of accepting and realising who we are, even if we don’t like it.

“Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully”.

Also, it seems to be like Holden Cauldfield functions as a ‘mirror’ for J.D Salinger; Holden was thought (for some publishers and readers) to be crazy, and J.D Salinger wrote the book after spending three years in a mental institution.

In my point of view, these both works show the struggles of become older and growing in life, confronting what society and families expect from us and accepting or not who we are.