The American Century: Literature since 1945 637to collect, before World War II. His first book, however, and his most famous, was a
novel, The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951. Its opening words, “If you really
want to know about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was
born,” introduces us to Holden Caulfield. It also introduces us, in an intimate,
immediate way that is characteristic of so much American writing, to the troubles
and contradictions of Holden’s life. Holden is an unhappy teenager who runs away
from boarding school. Lonely, quixotic, compassionate, he is plagued by the
“phoniness” of his environment. And in the book, he tells the story of his flight to
New York and his eventual nervous breakdown. It turns out, in the end, that he is
recalling all this from a sanatorium. The title of the novel refers to his desire to
preserve innocence: not his own – that, he senses, is already lost – but the innocence
of those still to grow up. He keeps picturing “little kids playing some game” in “this
big field of rye and all,” he tells his sister Phoebe. “Nobody big” is around, except
him; he is “standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.” “What I have to do,” he explains
to Phoebe, “I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff.” He has, in
short, to stop them from experiencing a fall that recalls both the mythical fall of
Adam and Eve into knowledge and the universal fall from innocence into experience,
from childhood into adulthood. Images of falling and flight pervade The Catcher in
the Rye. Holden dreams of heading West or lighting out for the country; he cherishes
anywhere that time seems to stand still. Equally, he fears any kind of fall, for himself
and others; at one point, he even finds it difficult, frightening, to step down from the
pavement on to the street. The novel is a triumph in the vernacular and confessional
modes, drawing the reader into the narrator’s deep resistance to the world that
surrounds him and, he feels, threatens to stifle him. It also offers us a hero who, in
his sadly contracted way, reminds us of the many other rebels and dreamers,
grotesque saints and would-be saviors that populate American fiction.
In particular, Holden recalls Huckleberry Finn in some ways. Like Huck, Holden
is an outsider who dislikes system and distrusts authority; like Huck, too, he has to
make his way through a world of hypocrisy and deceit that seems to threaten him at
every turn. For that matter, like Mark Twain, Salinger catches an American idiom,
the trick and lilt of his narrator’s voice, to draw the reader into a rapport with the
protagonist. And, also like Twain, one of the main weapons in his fictional armory is
a humor that depends on the telling; the quirky, comic way his hero describes the
venality and stupidity of the people he meets. The differences between the two
books, however, are at least as important as the connections; and these have much
more to do with the simple facts that Holden is a little older, much richer than Huck
and moves in an urban environment – an America where there is no longer any
territory, no frontier to which the hero can flee. Huck has an innocent eye. Holden
is more knowing, more judgmental and more deeply implicated – whether he likes
it or not – in the “phoney” circumstances he describes. He plays the social game
when he has to, quite successfully; he is aware of himself, and his image, in a way that
Huck clearly is not. Above all, the clarity and candor that characterize Huck, who is,
in the last analysis, a truthteller, are replaced by a deep unease and uncertainty.
Holden is confused; and, as his apparently spontaneous recollections of a crisis inGGray_c05.indd 637ray_c 05 .indd 637 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM