Many Americans, most notably many writers and intellectuals, saw the need to defend the United States and the freedoms that it purportedly protected against the communist threat.
The political unrest fostered by the Great Depression had subsided and, faced with the vision of Stalin’s nightmarish totalitarian regime, radical dissent lost its appeal. Assisted by the GI Bill, veterans attended college in record numbers, thus expanding the ranks of the professional-managerial class. The postwar economy was prospering, and millions of Americans bought homes in the newly developed suburbs. According to many historians and critics, this moment was characterized by a culture of consensus. While the still-pervasive ethos of individualism in the United States is in part responsible for The Catcher in the Rye’s persistent popularity, it is also important to understand the text in relation to its immediate historical context: the 1950s.
This suggests that Huck and Holden not only wish to escape the constricting, corrupting influence of civilization as they perceive it, but also to discover some unprecedented form of community or intimacy that the prevailing social order has denied them. I almost wished I was dead.” Both boys are motivated to consider suicide by a feeling of intense loneliness. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.” Holden: “All I did was, I got up and went over and looked out the window. Huck: “Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. In moments, Salinger seems to explicitly acknowledge Twain’s influence, as a juxtaposition of two short passages demonstrates. They assert their own relatively untarnished status through a vernacular style that does not conform to standard English. Both characters pursue an enclave of freedom and innocence and both resist the efforts of adults to educate and mold them in accordance with prevailing standards of conduct. Like Huck, Holden is both precocious and naïve, a worldly trickster quick to lie to protect himself, but preternaturally sensitive and thus horrified by the cruelty and decadence that he witnesses. The character to whom critics have most frequently compared Holden Caulfield is Huck Finn.
Salinger follows a long tradition of quixotic individualism among American authors-many of whom treat society as inherently corrupt and corrupting. Since 1951 when it was first published, The Catcher in the Rye has served as a resonant expression of alienation for several generations of adolescent readers and adults who have considered themselves at odds with the norms and institutions of American society. Yet the novel promotes solidarity with the protagonist, and one can imagine countless readers concluding: yes, the world is awash in materialism, shallowness, and insincerity, but I, like Holden, am different. Just about everyone Holden encounters, including his teachers, his classmates, his friends, and his fellow New Yorkers, is a “phony,” behaving in accordance with artificial conventions and disguising self-interest underneath a veneer of amiability. The readiness of teachers to embrace and assign this novel, despite its implicit indictment of the American educational system, is evidence of its extraordinary capacity to appeal even to those whom it risks insulting.
#The catcher in the rye text series#
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) opens with the sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield’s disillusioned departure from what may be the last in a series of schools that have failed to inspire, nurture, or support him, followed by a painful, sleep-deprived odyssey through the streets of New York City. One of the most widely taught novels in the United States, J.