captain if I were to consider all the stuff I didn’t get just because I tried it when I was in high school I’d really be here awhile…
Ten years ago I read The Catcher in the Rye in 10th grade English. I didn’t hate it, but felt the distinct sensation that I didn’t get it, and worse, felt alienated in the classroom because I was apparently in the minority of people who didn’t get it—which of course made me more frustrated, because it seemed all my classmates who said they liked it were just pretending to get it.
EXCESS WHINING START This was a long time ago and I don’t remember exactly how I felt when I was fifteen, but I might have thought Holden Caulfield seemed like a whiny guy with an annoying voice who made a lot of problems for himself (and also, was kind of sexist,* maybe).
*Which, he is saying things which are classifiably that, but he’s like 17 in the 1940s and throughout the book demonstrates his sense of compassion for others, including those he doesn’t understand, and including groups he at other times says unflattering, insulting things about
I didn’t like the way my teacher said the name “Holden Caulfield” either. It’s hard to articulate why but it was as if the verbalization of that name alone was somehow poetic, and it communicated everything it needed to about the story + themes of the book EXCESS WHINING END
Just finished rereading it, and it suffices to say I understand it now in a way I did not back then. At the heart of things is HC’s discomfort with “the phonies” of course (and his ability, while imperfect, to see right through their performative phony bullcrap nonsense), which I understood at the time, but on the other hand hadn’t lived the kind of social experiences which brings that insincerity out in people, at least in a way I recognized; the classmates of mine who I remember liking the book were some of the most insincere people I knew then—not sure what conclusion to draw from that. I couldn’t relate to the pessimism, and Holden’s complaining is really incessant. Not that I’m at all pessimistic now, but I at least understand what sort of behavior or element of adult life he/Salinger is skewering. It’s a sad book, and on a fundamental level my inability to comprehend that sadness kept me from understanding the purpose of certain scenes, dialogues, Holden’s thoughts. Nor was I able to really appreciate the sweeter moments, like the ending on the carousel, or the metaphor that gives the book its title. It makes sense now, I was just slow on the uptake.
Also ten years ago, after first reading TCITR, I watched Taxi Driver, having somehow received the impression that Taxi Driver “loosely adapted” certain scenes or elements from the book. They don’t have much in common, ultimately, but the point here is I didn’t much care for Taxi Driver when I first saw it either, and decided to mark the occasion of my rereading Catcher in the Rye by watching it again. I think again that being in high school and all that that implies was at the root of my misunderstanding in this case: I didn’t understand or know about people like Travis Bickle, or about the social/legal/municipal/national conditions (+ the war) which push people into the cross-section of situations he finds himself in; politics to me was nothing but presidents. If only I’d paid attention to the poster!
On every street in every city in this country there’s a nobody who dreams of being somebody. He’s a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove he’s alive.
Shortly before starting TCITR (not ten years ago, this is present day, present time, ahahaha) I started reading “Arm Joe,” which I first tried while I was a sophomore in high school, although it was not assigned reading (it would be two years later, in the worst literature class I have ever taken). I have less to say about it as I’m still in the middle of (the first volume of) it, but I will say it escaped me back then why the first eighty pages are spent chronicling the daily life and work of M. Bienvenu, the bishop of Digne. It wasn’t so much the purpose of the character’s inclusion which confused me as it was the abjectly dry language in which his activities were described—maybe a translation thing, but probably again just being in high school and all that that implies (or me uniquely being an idiot).
Anyway, now I wonder if anything in the book will be as good as the bishop chapters! What a cool guy
The person who had the book before me evidently did not care for the bishop themself (or else they were assigned to read the first Valjean chapters or something): 80 unmarked pages and then immediately out comes the black pen lol
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