Salinger's 1951 novel is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a sixteen-year-old recounting the days after his expulsion from a fourth school, spent alone in New York before returning home. The narration is retrospective, delivered from what is implied to be a psychiatric facility.
The recurring subject is Holden's charge of phoniness, which he applies to almost everyone he encounters and which he uses to reject the adult world he is being prepared to enter. Salinger constructs the novel so that Holden's judgments are frequently accurate and his own behaviour is equally inconsistent, which the narration reveals without commenting on.
The underlying material is grief. Holden's younger brother Allie died of leukaemia three years earlier, an event Holden mentions repeatedly and never processes, and his breakdown across the novel proceeds from it. The title comes from his misremembering of a Burns poem, in which he imagines catching children before they fall off a cliff, which is his statement of what he wants to do and which his sister Phoebe identifies as impossible.
The novel's cultural position is enormous and has been complicated by its association with several violent individuals who carried it. It is a first-person voice novel and readers who dislike the voice will find nothing else in it. The class position of the narrator, a wealthy boy in expensive schools, limits how universal the alienation is. Its business readership is small and its relevance is as a document of how a person constructs a moral position out of grief they cannot name.
Readers who want the canonical American novel of adolescent alienation and its construction of a moral stance from unexamined grief.
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