Well hello everybody, another long week in Megan Rempel’s busy life. I guess everybody has busy lives though. About to head to a softball tournament in Kelowna. GO CLASSICS! I’m proud to say I’m the loudest centerfield that a team probably has ever had. Anyway, go team, lets get on with this lovely review.
The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
This novel is written from a character’s mind that at times can be very difficult to understand, especially with Holden’s capability to always get lost in his thoughts. The style of writing lets you get lost in the never ending, subject changing abyss of Holden’s mind and emotions. I have read other reviews, and listened to comments on Catcher in the Rye and people say it’s a book that you either love or hate. I didn’t really love it or hate it honestly. Holden is unpredictable and doesn’t make too much sense most of the time, and there isn’t really a point to the story that I could find. That isn’t to say that there isn’t poetry throughout the story.
According to me, Holden is just a depressed guy that wanders around trying to weed through his sadness. He is also a very hypocritical character which I found entertaining seeing as he does the very same things that he hates about other characters in the novel.
To be honest, I don’t really know how to feel about this one, as well as I don’t understand how you could study this book in school. Then again, there is lots for a reader to interpret any which way you want. I think I’ll give Salinger a good 3 OUT OF 5 on this one. I enjoyed it but it’s not one of my favourites. Still, Catcher in the Rye is a classic, I think everybody should read it if they have a chance its not a heavy read.
ANYWAY, I’ll be off to play some softball now.
Toodles
MRR
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