J. D. Salinger issues several salvos against traditional education in his bildungsroman The Catcher in the Rye. The first occurs when Holden Caulfield tells his history teacher, Mr. Spencer, that English is the only subject he hasn’t failed this term, and Spencer doesn’t listen. We English teachers should listen, for this novel, though it has been challenged or banned in schools both religious and secular, offers a banquet of material to fill many course objectives. Among these are an introduction to linguistics (e.g., discourse analysis, lexical semantics, etymology, morphology) and philosophical worldviews (Freudian, Rousseavian, Marxian) that facilitates the study of narrative elements (characterization, point of view, conflict) that are often studied, less effectively, in isolation. Additionally, this linguistic and philosophical approach generates material for an apologia for Holden that emerges from the language and ideas of his own narration. Christian high school teachers should not avoid The Catcher in the Rye. From small-picture attention to detail to big-picture practice with synthesis, listening to Holden develops critical thinking and communication skills that benefit students well beyond the classroom.
From small-picture attention to detail to big-picture practice with synthesis, listening to Holden develops critical thinking and communication skills that benefit students well beyond the classroom.
Audience participation is plainly welcomed by the novel’s narrator, who opens his monologue with a deictic1 “you” that conflates listeners/readers and a fictional psychoanalyst in a quest “to know the truth” (3, 276). Not too many people want to listen to Holden, though they themselves demand to be heard. “Listen,” Carl Luce says. “I refuse to answer any typical Caulfield questions tonight” (189). While it’s true that Holden’s questions are often annoying, —by turns prying and peculiar—at his sixteen-year-old best he seeks answers to ancient questions about matters like the physical and metaphysical nature of love, existence, and death. According to Christian apologist Os Guinness in his book Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion, many people today are mostly “untroubled rather than unreached, unconcerned rather than unconvinced” and therefore “need questions as much as answers” (124). Perhaps this is why Holden feels so out of step. He is troubled and concerned—about things like sex, socioeconomic inequity, and the death of innocence and innocents. He is passionately unconvinced by the prevailing belief that “life is a game that one plays according to the rules” (12). And he is unreached in the missional sense.
Christian education has an implicit missional purpose neatly summarized in an archaic but apt sense of the word conversation. Meaning citizenship in heaven and conduct and behavior toward others on earth, this definition of conversation articulates a twofold relationship fundamental to all of Christian life (“Conversation”). To assign Catcher with the objective of conducting this kind of conversation with its protagonist is to involve students in a literary thought experiment with real life applications for the missional opportunities common to all of life’s vocations. What follows is a conceptual sample of one way in which this objective could be implemented.
A discourse analysis of two words in Holden’s storytelling—catch[er] and hold[en]—reveals treasured but skewed notions of innocence, justice, and freedom.
Listening Critically: The Heart of Stories
Holden’s psychotherapist is schooled in the listening skills modeled by Sigmund Freud in his talking cure. Freud claimed an ability to “observ[e] what [people] say and what they show” in order to lay bare “the most hidden recesses of the mind” (69). Christian apologists also observe what a person says and does—in order to discern what Jesus refers to as the “treasure of their heart” (Guinness 123)2. Since we do not have Christ’s “instant discernment,” we need to “take the time . . . to listen to their stories” (Guinness 127). A discourse analysis of two words in Holden’s storytelling—catch[er] and hold[en]—reveals treasured but skewed notions of innocence, justice, and freedom. Though other words in Holden’s story could also be profitably investigated, these two words, semantically dependent on context because of their polysemy, are ripe for this listening activity.
Listening Critically: Catching the Contextual Drift
Holden’s ironic misquoting of Robert Burns’s poem conveys his desire to save children from a loss of innocence or life (he thinks the line of the poem is “if a body catch a body” rather than Burns’s “if a body meet a body,”) but catch is not always used salvifically. For instance, Holden also wants the unjust perpetrator to be caught—and vengefully punished. His outrage over the lenient penalty imposed upon the bullies responsible for James Castle’s suicidal fall is echoed in his use of identical language to describe a less harmful wrongdoing at his sister’s elementary school: someone has written “f— you” on a wall. He imagines himself “catching” the offender and “smash[ing] his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody” (221, 261). The unjust excess warping his sense of justice is quickly followed by a fear of being misjudged that is also conveyed by catch. As he erases the profanity from the wall, he is “afraid that some teacher would catch me rubbing it off and would think I’d written it” (261).
In yet another context, catch denotes contagion. Salinger’s choice of the old-fashioned term grippe to refer to Mr. Spencer’s influenza implies a synonymity with catch that he later makes explicit. Holden’s younger sister, Phoebe, assures her mother that she “didn’t catch anything” from her friend Alice, whose mother kept “asking her if she felt grippy during the whole entire movie” (230). Here and elsewhere in the novel, physical illness may be a metaphor for the infectious influence of a corrupt society, which Rousseau and other Romantics have written about. In this interpretative vein, the youthfully innocent Phoebe and Alice are immune to society’s clutches, whereas Holden may have caught Old Spencer’s grippe.
Here and elsewhere in the novel, physical illness may be a metaphor for the infectious influence of a corrupt society, which Rousseau and other Romantics have written about.
A significant development in Holden’s characterization, conveyed through the merging of catch’s different meanings, occurs when he returns to the familiarity of home. Suddenly feeling free of pneumonic symptoms, he “quits worrying about whether [his parents would] catch me home or not” (212). When he leaves, it is with considerably less stealth, partly because he doesn’t “give much of a damn any more if they caught me. . . . If they caught me, they caught me. I almost wished they did, in a way” (233–34). He seems willing to be caught-nabbed because he needs to be caught-saved.
Listening Critically: Holding On and Being Held
Though Holden has no say in his naming, his uses of hold, which is derived from Middle English holden, are generally consistent with the aggressive or protective contexts of its synonym, catch (“Hold”). His “wrestling hold” on his frenemy Stradlater could “choke him to death” (39). But when dancing with Phoebe, “hold[ing] her close as hell” (227)3, he seems to want to keep her innocence safe in his grasp—a custodial “watching over” identified in hold’s Germanic etymology (“Hold”).
When [Pheobe] begs to join [Holden] on his trip out West, he is cornered by competing treasures—her innocent, loyal love and his desire to be free of love’s obligation.
The etymology of hold’s prefixed form, behold, attributes a prophetic intensity to looking that “hold[s its object] in view” (“Behold”). Its dictional formality excludes it from Catcher’s stream-of-consciousness, but its weaker synonyms—look, see, and watch—pervade the narrative, often intimating nostalgia for a lost Eden. For instance, Holden pauses almost reverentially before a snowfall that makes the human landscape “look . . . nice and white” (48). The next day, in Central Park, he beholds “dog crap, gobs of spit, and cigar butts from old men” and doubts that “Christmas was coming soon” (153). He admits to a troubling “fascina[tion]” with watching the hotel’s “perverts” (139), but watching Phoebe on the carousel (watch occurs repeatedly in this penultimate chapter) floods him with happiness because she “looked so damn nice” (275).
Behold’s past participle, beholden, originally described a protective keeping, but its etymology has evolved to mean obligated or indebted (“Beholden”). Holden does not want to be beholden. In language echoing his description of his wrestling hold on Stradlater, he feels like he might “choke to death” (233) on his uncontrollable sobs after Phoebe gives him her Christmas dough. When she begs to join him on his trip out West, he is cornered by competing treasures—her innocent, loyal love and his desire to be free of love’s obligation. Consumed with antipathy, he wants “to smack her for a second” (267) and finds that he “almost hate[s] her” (268).
Listening Critically: A Dialogic Conversation
Full of contradiction and ambivalence, this unreliable narrator concludes with the same ironic filler he used to begin: “if you really want to know the truth.” His therapy seems not to have yielded many insights, for at its end he admits, “I don’t know what I think about it [all]” (276). As part of his deictic “you,” we are implicitly invited to respond. And we can do so by folding his monologue—laden with discrepant bits of Rousseavian Romanticism, Marxian class consciousness, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory—into a Christian conversation.
We weigh in as clay jars, and we can avoid a few pottery pitfalls if we examine our hearts before we offer an apologia for the treasure that lies within the story. Chief among these pitfalls might be an egotistic certainty that “love[s] to hear the sound of our own answers” (Guinness 175). Closely aligned with this egotism is an idolatrous appreciation for technique. Though technique is part of every endeavor, “when it is used to communicate God’s truth, the mere technique is swallowed up in . . . the truth and dynamic of the subversive gospel of the cross” (Guinness 44).
With these groundings in mind, we begin to ask questions and offer observations about those things we’ve heard to be treasures in Holden’s heart. This is an abridged version of this article. To read more, subscribe to the print or digital edition of Christian Educators Journal.
Works Cited
“Behold.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper. www.etymonline.com/word/hold. Accessed 22 November 2024.
“Beholden.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper. www.etymonline.com/word/hold. Accessed 22 November 2024.
Calvin, John. “Commentary on Philippians.” John Calvin: Commentary on Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom42.iv.iv.iv.html#.
“Conversation.” Encyclopedia of the Bible. Bible Gateway, www.biblegateway.com/resources/encyclopedia-of-the-bible/Conversation. Accessed 1 October 2024.
Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Edited by Philip Rieff. Touchstone, 1997.
Guinness, Os. Fool’s Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion. IVP Books, 2015.
“Hold.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper. www.etymonline.com/word/hold. Accessed 22 November 2024.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Fundamental Political Writings. Translated by Ian Johnston, edited by Matthew W. Maguire and David Lay Williams. Broadview, 2018.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Back Bay Books, 1979.
Judith E. Anderson, a retired English teacher, is the author of Stones and Stories: A Primer on Literary Analysis, Hermeneutics, and Writing, and of essays on Macbeth and the Epistle of James (CSJ) and on Poe’s “Hop-Frog” and the Book of Esther (PSUP).
- Deictic (or indexical) refers in linguistics to a word dependent upon spatial, temporal or (in this case) personal context for clear reference.
↩︎ - Calvin references Matt. 6:21 (heart treasure) in his commentary on citizenship and conversation in Phil 3:20.
↩︎ - Critics have discussed the sexual tension suggested here; however, Freudian presuppositions and conclusions are not thus proved, as this article argues.
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