From The Guilder Lehrman Institute of American History

History~Now: American History Online

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/fifties/essays/catcher-rye-voice-alienation

The Catcher in the Rye: The Voice of Alienation

by Timothy Aubry, assistant professor of English at Baruch College, The City University
of New York

One of the most widely taught novels in the United States, J. D. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Salinger follows a long tradition of quixotic individualism among American authors—

many of whom treat society as inherently corrupt and corrupting. The character to whom
critics have most frequently compared Holden Caulfield is Huck Finn. 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. 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. They assert their own relatively untarnished status through a vernacular style
that does not conform to standard English. In moments, Salinger seems to explicitly
acknowledge Twain’s influence, as a juxtaposition of two short passages demonstrates.
Huck: “Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something
cheerful, but it warn’t no use. 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. I felt so lonesome, all of a
sudden. I almost wished I was dead.” Both boys are motivated to consider suicide by a
feeling of intense loneliness. 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.
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. According to many
historians and critics, this moment was characterized by a culture of consensus. The
postwar economy was prospering, and millions of Americans bought homes in the newly
developed suburbs. Assisted by the GI Bill, veterans attended college in record numbers,
thus expanding the ranks of the professional-managerial class. 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. 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. At the same time,
however, critics were concerned by patterns of widespread conformity. Mass market
commodities, bewildering corporate bureaucracies, and uniformly designed suburbs, they
feared, were serving to homogenize the population, creating what sociologist David
Riesman in 1950 described as “the other-directed” person, or what journalist William
Whyte six years later termed the “organization man”—individuals focused on getting
along, desperate for the approval of others, and incapable of independent thought or
action. Holden Caulfield famously offered his own term of disparagement, “phony,” and
thus appealed to broadly shared anxieties about a conformist culture.

Recently, scholars have challenged the characterization of the 1950s as a period of

uniformity, optimism, and harmony, pointing to unspoken divisions, festering conflicts,
and subterranean forms of dissatisfaction and revolt. While many WWII soldiers gladly
reintegrated into American society, many others suffered from psychic scars. Mental
health clinics proliferated during this period in response to a variety of psychological
complaints among veterans and the general population. Subcultures formed around the
abuse of illicit drugs. Millions of Americans, as Alfred Kinsey discovered, secretly
engaged in a variety of sexual practices considered deviant. Racial tensions escalated,
leading to the growth of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the emergence of the
Nation of Islam as an outlet for black frustrations. And if the Cold War promoted
patriotism, the threat of worldwide annihilation fostered diffuse anxiety, and the
immediate postwar period witnessed the formation of pacifist groups committed to civil
disobedience. While most Americans did not actively engage in political demonstrations
during this time, for those who were not entirely satisfied with the lifestyles available to
them, for those whose experiences clashed with the picture of a self-confident, optimistic
America, for those who found the society that they inhabited artificial or shallow, Holden
Caulfield served as a misfit hero.

Since its publication, The Catcher in the Rye has been banned frequently in schools and
libraries across the country and, while civic crusaders have pointed to its obscene
language, Holden’s frank discussion of unsettling and taboo subjects incompatible with
America’s positive self-image also provoked concerns. He describes the sexual
promiscuity of his classmates and the profound ambivalence that this inspires in him,
detailing his awkward encounter with a prostitute and his eventual refusal of her services.
“Sex,” he remarks, “is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t.” He also
discusses his struggles with mental illness: “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that
happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come
out here and take it easy.” The narrative suggests that in addition to his distant and
neurotic parents, an inhospitable environment—a vicious prep school social hierarchy,
callous teachers, and a city of predators, strangers, and social-climbers—precipitates his
breakdown. Holden offers an unflattering picture of postwar America and adopts a series
of unorthodox positions at odds with mainstream values, calling himself “sort of an
atheist” and “a pacifist.” He asserts, “I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb
invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it”—a
remark that aligns the United States’ military strategy with the suicidal impulses of a
confused adolescent.

Above all else, Holden resists the imperative to grow up and assume adult
responsibilities, which would be to surrender his integrity. His older brother D. B., who
works as a Hollywood writer, has, he claims, become a “prostitute.” Unable to think of a
single profession that he would like to enter, Holden declares in response to his younger
sister Phoebe’s suggestion that he become a lawyer:

I mean they’re all right if they go around saving innocent guys’ lives all
the time, and like that, but you don’t do that kind of stuff if you’re a
lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge
and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides.
Even if you did go around saving guys’ lives and all, how would you
know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or
because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific
lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you
in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the
way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren’t being a
phony? The trouble is, you wouldn’t.

The rituals, rules, and rewards that attend adult professional life are so insidious,
according to Holden, that they forestall even the capacity to recognize one’s own
hypocrisy or to distinguish sincerity from self-deception. Rejecting the legal profession,
Holden describes his ideal vocation in the most famous passage in the book:

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of
rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I
mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.
What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the
cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I
have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all
day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s
the only thing I’d really like to be.

Holden’s urge to shield children from danger and allow them to play endlessly
exemplifies his desire to suspend time, to inhabit a space of youth preserved indefinitely,
a desire he also reveals through his adoration of the ten-year-old Phoebe and his
attachment to the Natural History Museum, where “everything always stayed right where
it was.”

Paradoxically, the museum exhibits its subjects in an immobilized state, thus impeding
their temporal development only by imposing upon them a static, deathly condition.
Holden’s refusal of adulthood, to put it another way, coincides with his suicidal
tendencies, and many readers have argued that his critique offers no alternative to the
phony society that he deplores, other than infantilism, insanity, or death. Indeed The
Catcher in the Rye, some claim, irresponsibly celebrates immaturity, encouraging its
readers to remain children and thereby to resist practical engagement with the social
problems that the book diagnoses. One might contend, however, that Holden’s stubbornly
childlike perspective demonstrates greater wisdom and maturity than the ostensibly more
realistic outlook of those who gladly accept the conventional roles offered to them.
Though admitting that, “some times I act like I’m about thirteen,” Holden maintains,
“sometimes I act a lot older than I am—I really do—but people never notice it. People
never notice anything.” A central challenge of reading The Catcher in the Rye, arguably,
is learning to detect in Holden’s seemingly simple, naive voice, a measure of
perceptiveness and subtlety that the jaded, pseudo-sophisticated adults who urge him to
“play according to the rules” utterly lack. Of course one can reach this understanding
without concluding that Holden represents a viable model for how to live, especially
given the pain and insecurity that his heightened sensitivity produces. According to critic
Leerom Medovoi, Salinger’s novel allows readers to identify with the radical idealism
that Holden exemplifies and at the same time to position this stance safely within the
phase of exploratory adolescence, thus treating it as something that one must ultimately
outgrow.

Holden never seems to find the community of fellow idealists that he seeks, but he invites
readers to share his sensibility, often addressing them directly, asserting in remembering
his deceased older brother that “you’d have liked him,” or in describing a self-indulgent
piano player, “you would’ve puked.” For many youths, reading The Catcher in the Rye
functioned in the 1950s as a badge of self-declared authenticity, and some critics hold
that it helped to foster forms of disaffection central to the counter-cultural movement of
the 1960s. Its power to provoke identification and compassion among readers even now
testifies to the persistence of social pressures and expectations that make adolescence an
especially bewildering and painful time. For those who read his novel at the right
moment, Salinger’s not inconsequential gift is to render this difficult period of life at least
slightly more bearable.