The Emo Dude: A Review of The Catcher in the Rye

Pound for pound, The Catcher in the Rye would win the American novella category and rank highly among all the novels I have read to date.

First-person narrator Holden Caulfield is America's first literary teenager, opening the door for a new genre, the teenage confessional. Like East of Eden, Ordinary People, The Outsiders and Rebel Without a Cause, The Catcher in the Rye authentically portrays the struggles of teenage boys in a certain place and time. The quality of the writing is first rate. A lot happens in four days trapped inside the head of the 17 year-old protagonist.

Holden was an anti-hero before the term was popular. He was an "emo dude with an attitude," who took on the establishment (rotten school staff) and fought a date rapist (Stradlater) physically superior to him. He worshiped his little sister and grieved for his deceased little brother, Allie. He was trapped in the in-between state of a teenager struggling to become a man, seeking out and engaging with adults while blazing a trail of frustration with his emotionally inferior peers, embodied in Ackley and Sally Hayes

Holden doesn't give a hoot about "fitting in" with his teenage peers. He's fed up with their phoniness and shallow values. He is striving mightily to be an adult, experimenting with adult behaviors like social drinking, smoking, dancing at a nightclub with women much older than him, initiating conversation with adults like the woman on the train, the cabbies, the nuns, a former upper classmate, a former teacher and even a prostitute.

The source of Holden's unhappiness is his 'tween status, stuck between adolescence and adulthood. His disaffection with his former peer group results in his groping for a place/identity among adults. He is unwittingly on a quest, an exploration for his place among adults. Having rejected his former place among the the Pencey crowd and not yet found a comfortable place among adults, he feels lonely, stuck in a "twilight zone."

Holden isn't "fitting in" because he's outgrown people like his suitemates Stradlater and Ackley and girlfriend Sally Hayes and the creeps who stole from him and the ones who bullied James Castle in to committing suicide. He's ready to move on, but where? Holden is like the pond "half-frozen, half-not frozen," stuck in a discomfort zone. Limbo. Even a former teacher lets him down, or so he thinks.

One thing he cherishes over everything else is innocence, and that's what saves him--coming home to his adoring, brilliant, optimistic, unsoiled little sister, Phoebe. And she rescues him, reassures him of his value to her with her non-judgmental loyalty and love.

The Catcher in the Rye can be seen as a young adult novel or an adult novel about the teenager within us all, a lament on the necessary loss of innocence on the way to adulthood. You can't read it as an adult without getting personality insights that were impossible as a teen because teens are by definition living within the transitional state exemplified in Holden. They can't see it as transitional because it's the only reality they know, the fog they are living within.

Caterpillar, pupa and butterfly are different states of being. The vast majority of teens are emerging from pupae-ville, just starting to sample the sights and smells of the world. For them, death--James Castle's mangled body--is an abstract notion, something in a video or book or some stage or screen rendition of Romeo and Juliet. The average teen has never been in the presence of a lifeless body and smelled death's pungent vapors--well, maybe a frog in biology class--let alone lost a beloved sibling.

Only an adult can look back on their teenage years with perspective, yet academia keeps throwing The Catcher in the Rye at teenagers because of what it says about the challenges of growing up.

The Catcher in the Rye depicts an upper-middle-class male in an urban setting going through a crisis. He's overwhelmed by the pressures of becoming an adult, but too much has been thrown at him at once. He hasn't gotten over the death of his beloved younger brother, Allie, when he witnesses the suicide of a dormitory mate, James Castle. He's been traumatized and can't function. How much can a guy take?