Introducing The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
As with many singular works of literature, popular consensus on the meaning and themes of J.D. Salinger&#8217;s watershed bildungsroman, The Catcher in the Rye, is wrong by a large margin. The novel&#8217;s protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has become a byword for teenage rebellion and freethinking, and while he does express those modes of his personality in ample measure in the narrative, it is ultimately a facile characterization of both Holden and the book&#8217;s larger project to think of him as a freelance rebel without a cause. Holden&#8217;s alternately deeply considered and brash behavior reflect a mind that is itself schismastic as a result, perhaps unsurprisingly, of unresolved trauma—that this fact is lionized in the culture as a proto-punk middle-finger waving insurrection, whereby Holden plays the part of the youthful beatnik, an icon of American iconoclasm, presaging the later tumult of the 1960s, is wrong; moreover it&#8217;s a missed opportunity to understand Holden and the root of his pain.
At its most basic level, The Catcher in the Rye is a story about three brothers—with the middle brother, Holden, occupying the book&#8217;s central perspective and narrative voice. And what a voice he has: piercing, stubborn, glib, in possession of some (if markedly not all) aspects of the truth, a strong BS-detector, and suddenly, he can get light, free, and lyrical. This voice is an excellent vehicle for the novel, which not only upsets the tone of conventional narrative voices, but is one that is able to absord the difficult task of masking and unmasking its main character using subtle shifts in language and word choice from the book&#8217;s first page. The novel&#8217;s major theme is not rebellion, as such; rather it is the inner dislocation that may be experienced by the loss of a loved one, in this case, the youngest of the Caulfield brothers, Allie. The plot of the book is a manifestation of all the heartache, gear-grinding, and clinical depression that can ensue if that trauma and heartache is to remain unresolved.
To understand why Holden remains raw, we should take a step back and have a look at the context into which the book was written.
By the end of the 1940s, America&#8217;s hegemony on the world stage was settling into a comfortable first act. It was the beginning of what would come to be known as the Cold War—forty years of intense ideological and economic warfare, conducted with espionage and diplomacy, with several notable &#8220;hot wars&#8221; interspersed across the decades (espcially in Korea and Vietnam)—between the grand constituents of the new bi-polar post-war geopolitical world: The United States and the USSR. 
In the United States, Americans, flush with capital—they were responsible for a whopping 50% of global GDP at the time, a staggering figure for a single country—was finally ready to come home, settle down, and start families. It was the era of the white picket fence and the two-car garage. It marked the birth of suburbia as we know it, with its attendant values of middle class conservativism, matinee idols and pep rallies, manufactured consent, comfort and conformity. This was exemplified in the new mass technology of the age: the medium of television. In 1950, less than 4 million households owned a television set, by the end of the decade, when &#8220;All American&#8221; programming such as Leave it to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show were all the rage, that number had ballooned to 45 million households. By 1960, 87% of American homes had a television. Yet despite the domination of a singular, conservative American media landscape and mass culture, as far back as the late 1940s, there was the emergence of a counterculture—a Zeitgeist waiting in the wings, working the margins with distinction. This included Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, whose book publications often lagged the exploits they feature by a number of years; as well, the development of the New York School, a group of artists and poets, featuring writers such as Frank O&#8217;Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery, and painters like Willem DeKooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jackson Pollock. J.D. Salinger&#8217;s debut novel, The Catcher in the Rye, played well into this moment in time, portraying what appears to be a rather blithe and transgressive model of adolesence who effects in the culture would not only be deeply felt at the time of the novel&#8217;s first appearance, but which continue to be analysed and studied in classrooms some seventy years after its publication. 
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&#8220;If there&#8217;s one thing I hate, it&#8217;s the movies. Don&#8217;t even mention them to me.&#8221; 
-Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 1. 
 
Indeed, what would have been more un-American and transgressive than scorning the movies? To understand this, let&#8217;s have a look at the book&#8217;s opening. The narrative opens in California, where Holden has gone to cool his jets. We come to find out that Holden, who is obsessed with the concept of authenticity—people are either real or phoney—has been kicked out of his fancy prep school, Pencey, for his refusal to &#8220;apply himself.&#8221; He&#8217;s failing all his classes, save English. His behavior, which from the outside must appear erratic, adheres to a mysterious rubric of real and fake, decent people and crooks, and Holden is convinced he&#8217;s got the correct read on who&#8217;s who and what&#8217;s what. What we&#8217;re not clear on yet is why.
In order to fully unpack the mystery of Holden&#8217;s obsession, the state of mind that pushes him into increasingly unorthodox, but still grounded and felt behavior, it&#8217;s important to examine closely the relationship between Holden and his two brothers, to unpack the role he plays ensconced between the two, in hopes of fully honoring Holden&#8217;s pain, and the great impression he has made on the hearts and minds of readers the world over for well over half a century.
Happy reading.
-Allen Guy Wilcox