From Jesus-Figure to Incestuous Impulses, 13 Critics Weigh In

Emily Temple July 2, 2018 (LitHub.com)

Here are some things we’ve been talking about in the Literary Hub office lately: Is Holden Caulfield a tragic hero or an unbearable whiny teen? Is he misunderstood? Is he relevant to youth today? Is The Catcher in the Rye even any good? Does it matter, if it has meant something to generations of readers? Do we only like it because our parents did? Why do we talk about it so much more than Nine Stories, which is objectively superior? (To each his own, is my take—but I, having never liked The Catcher in the Rye or its deeply phony narrator, also don’t think we should keep things in the canon just because they’ve always been there.)

If nothing else, we can all at least agree that Holden Caulfield is still (though decreasingly) a cultural touchstone in this country, in part because parents keep giving the book to their children and in part because so many students are still required to read it in school. Accordingly, over the years there have been hundreds, and maybe thousands, of critical essays written about Salinger’s work in general, and The Catcher in the Rye in particular, and Holden Caulfield in even more particular. The critics, much like the population at large, do not come to much of a consensus. For instance, some have compared Holden to Jesus. Some, on the other hand, have argued that the book is about his desire to have sex with his little sister. Some consider Holden a model for American youth. Some fear he is its downfall. We will all have to decide for ourselves, but for a little guidance, below you can look through what some writers and critics have said about Holden, organized roughly from most glowing to least impressed.

Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, in The Fiction of J. D. Salinger:

After the reader recovers from the releasing of Holden’s invective (e.g., “Her son was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pencey, in the whole crumby history of the school”) and of his exposé of phoniness (e.g., a Radio City Christmas complete with what has been identified as the movie of James Hilton’s Random Harvest), he goes on to appreciate the pathos of Holden’s loneliness and frustration.

But nervous cynicism and neurosis are not enough for fiction in depth, and the next step for a reader should be to realize that Holden Caulfield is actually a saintly Christian person (there is no need to call him a Christ-figure). True, he has little notion of the love of God, and he thinks that “all the children in our family are atheists.” But (1) he himself never does a wrong thing: instead of commandments, Holden breaks only garage windows (when his brother dies), and the no-smoking rule in the Pencey dormitory. (2) He sacrifices himself in a constant war against evil, even though he has a poignantly Manichean awareness of its ubiquity (“If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the [ubiquitously scrawled dirty words] in the world.”) And more importantly, (3) his reward is to understand that if one considers humanity, one must love it. The text for Holden’s behavior is his insistence — oddly enough, to his Quaker friend Childs on absolute primitive Christianity: “Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. . . . I think any one of the Disciples would’ve sent him to Hell and all—and fast, too—but I’ll bet anything Jesus didn’t do it.

For Jesus and Holden Caulfield truly love their neighbors, especially the poor in goods, appearance, and spirit.

Verdict: Holden’s so good, he’s basically Jesus.

Tobias Wolff, in a 2008 interview with NPR:

[Holden]’s a very, very funny fellow. And he’s very acute in spotting phonies. The problem with Holden is that, to him, everyone, after a while, seems phony. As funny the book as it is, and reading through it again recently, I found it devastatingly sad.

. . .

His younger brother who he has idolized for his innocence -the way he now does his sister Phoebe – has died. And he ruminates on the – on going to his grave and being caught in a downpour and thinking of leaving his brother there underground in this terrible day. And later, he himself is walking along the street in New York. And it should be festive. It’s around Christmastime. The shoppers are out. And he is broken into a sweat. Every time he steps off the curb, he thinks I’m going to go down and down forever. No one will ever see me again. This kind of calls up that image of his brother in his grave. And he starts praying to his brother – Allie, don’t let me disappear. Don’t let me disappear. There’s such terror there. The humor that has sustained so much of this novel begins to unravel at the end and you’re left with this naked soul in pain and in conflict. Finally, you see not with the world but with himself.

. . .

When I first read it, I felt as if [Holden was] a confederate of mine, you know, a teammate in this skepticism about the worthiness of adult life, and now I look at him, in a way, like his old teacher, Mr. Antolini, who pats his head while he’s asleep. Then Holden wakes up from that and imagines that the man has made a pass at him he can’t even accept that, that avuncular affection that the man is overcome by. And I have that avuncular affection for Holden and I have a degree of sorrow, really, that I couldn’t possibly have felt at that time.

Verdict: Our Great American Teenager.

William Faulkner, in a 1958 address to the English Club of the University of Virginia:

I have not read all the work of this present generation of writing. I have not had time yet. So I must speak only of the ones I do know. I am thinking now of what I rate the best one, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because this one expresses so completely what I have tried to say. A youth, father to what will—must—someday be a man, more intelligent than some and more sensitive than most, who—he would not even have called it by instinct because he did not know he possessed it because God perhaps had put it there, loved man and wished to be a part of mankind, humanity, who tried to join the human race and failed. To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. There was nothing for him to do save buzz, frantic and inviolate, inside the glass wall of his tumbler, until he either gave up or was himself, by himself, by his own frantic buzzing, destroyed.

Verdict: Holden as tragic hero.

Louis Menand, in “Holden Caulfield at Fifty“:

Supposedly, kids respond to The Catcher in the Rye because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book.

. . .

Holden talks like a teenager, and this makes it natural to assume that he thinks like a teenager as well. But like all the wise boys and girls in Salinger’s fiction—like Esmé and Teddy and the many brilliant Glasses—Holden thinks like an adult. No teen-ager (and very few grownups, for that matter) sees through other human beings as quickly, as clearly, or as unforgivingly as he does. Holden is a demon of verbal incision. . . .

”You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way.” The secret to Holden’s authority as a narrator is that he never lets anything stand by itself. He always tells you what to think. He has everyone pegged. That’s why he’s so funny. But The New Yorker’s editors were right: Holden isn’t an ordinary teenager—he’s a prodigy. He seems (and this is why his character can be so addictive) to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life.

. . .

Holden, after all, isn’t unhappy because he sees that people are phonies; he sees that people are phonies because he is unhappy. What makes his view of other people so cutting and his disappointment so unappeasable is the same thing that makes Hamlet’s feelings so cutting and unappeasable: his grief. Holden is meant, it’s true, to be a kind of intuitive moral genius. (So, presumably, is Hamlet.) But his sense that everything is worthless is just the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies. Life starts to seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about death; they lose their taste for it.

Verdict: Holden as sorrow king; not a mirror but a model. 

Alfred Kazin, from “J. D. Salinger: Everybody’s Favorite,” 1961:

I am sorry to have to use the word “cute” in respect to Salinger, but there is absolutely no other word that for me so accurately typifies the self-conscious charm and prankishness of his own writing and his extraordinary cherishing of his favorite Glass characters.

Holden Caulfield is also cute in The Catcher in the Rye, cute in his little-boy suffering for his dead brother, Allie, and cute in his tenderness for his sister, “Old Phoebe.” But we expect that boys of that age may be cute—that is, consciously appealing and consciously clever. To be these things is almost their only resource in a world where parents and schoolmasters have all the power and the experience. Cuteness, for an adolescent, is to turn the normal self-pity of children, which arises from their relative weakness, into a relative advantage vis-à-vis the adult world. It becomes a role boys can play in the absence of other advantages, and The Catcher in the Rye is so full of Holden’s cute speech and cute innocence and cute lovingness for his own family that one must be an absolute monster not to like it.

Verdict: Cute.

Continue reading Holden Caulfield: Egotistical Whiner or Melancholy Boy Genius? →