After all, Catcher's genre-the coming of age novel-is intrinsic to American narrative. Scholars have positioned the novel within the wider currents of American literature. However beyond such intimacy, the private identification with a book and a charismatic main character, Catcher speaks to a much broader community. These essayists remind readers today that once upon a time novels, and the characters in them, had the deeply personal impact that are now routinely associated with films, music, and television. In these poignant essays, readers set aside the pedagogical imperative and attempt to understand the human ties they felt with Holden. There are, of course, essays that detail the emotional impact of first hearing Holden's voice. This volume gathers essays-now-classic investigations into the novel as well as new perspectives-that collectively offer the opportunity to begin such a re-introduction. Liberated from the need to identify with (or the zeal to condemn) Holden Caulfield, liberated from the dark charisma of its troubled hermit-author, we can at last confront a novel whose argument, as it turns out, we have only begun to measure. And there is more to Catcher in the Ryethan Sonny Salinger. As it turns out, there is more to Holden Caulfield than, well, Holden. This volume argues that, with the death of Salinger, we are at a threshold moment in our long obsession with Holden and its eccentric author, a chance to re-approach The Catcher in the Rye. And far more telling, in our culture's hard-won environment of diversity, Holden can appear to have little to say to, well, just about everyone, to minorities, to women, to the religiously devout, to gays indeed, he speaks for a distinctly narrow demographic-spoiled, horny, white, private school-educated agnostic American male children of privilege. Holden's anti-authoritarianism seems cliché his rants against phony adults, pedestrian his apprehensions over sex, trivial his terror over growing up, childish. By contemporary standards, Holden's swearing lacks fire and, far worse, originality. Indeed, by any contemporary measure of cool, Holden can come across as a shrill, obnoxious, judgmental, whiney, arrogant kid whose entire psychic stability has been unhinged by a single death (his younger brother's. What happens when the bogeyman no longer terrifies? And the question now arises: What exactly are we to do with a shocking book that no longer shocks, an incendiary text that no longer incites. For more than fifty years, Catcher, easily the most banned book of the twentieth century American canon, the favorite target of conservative school systems, earnest parents groups, and strident church organizations, has thrived on its reputation as an underground text, passed among ardent readers with cult-like fanaticism, hard core fans who have found in the lonely misfit Holden Caulfield a companion, a friend for life.īut time has passed.
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