Perhaps what’s difficult about Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is that it doesn’t have much of a plotline. The novel expresses a general feeling more than it does a story, submerging you into the world of a boy who is simultaneously sorry for, disgusted with, and drawn to the dishonest character and sexual impulses of the city.

 

Holden Cauffield, Salinger’s lead character, approaches everything with some measure of cynicism. Anything that you might regard with interest or pleasure becomes really quite foolish through his eyes: handsome, charming boys who sweep you off your feet are just self-centered snobs who have learned how to say things to get what they want, renowned piano players are show-offs reveling in their own fame rather than in their music, good movies are meaningless cliches executed by actors who think too much of themselves. There is not a single moment of magic in Holden’s life, because he sees the folly in everything. There is nothing that truly interests him, nothing that’s worth living for. And as his helpless observer, we feel devoid of meaning and purpose when we follow him on his aimless wanderings, from station to hotel, from hotel to bar, and from bar back to hotel, then from hotel to park, and park to museum. The motif as to “where the ducks go in the winter, when the pond freezes over?” evokes at once a sense of poignant emptiness and a frosty, forlorn ambience, giving an insight as to Holden's pointless, lonely life.

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“Phony.” That’s probably the singularly most overused word in the entire novel. Holden’s roommate, Stradlater, is the spitting image of a star student, with a neat appearance and straight-A grades; yet secretly, he is a complete slob, and relies on Holden to write all his papers for him. We see that Holden becomes irrationally angry at anything that appears phony, but he himself is a giant, compulsive liar: oftentimes he finds himself “shooting the bull” for no reason at all. He even comes to Stradlater’s defense when Ackley begins to complain about him, suggesting an element of his solidarity with the former. And so comes the paradox of his character, the source of his sense of alienation: he identifies with the very thing he loathes – the illegitimate, the illusory,  and the inauthentic.

 

He does attempt to fit in with the immoral world that he now regards as his own: he solicits a prostitute, he drinks and smokes, he engages in brawls. Yet he cannot seem to reconcile himself with this identity. Although aware of the corrupt nature of adulthood, he has a childlike sense of goodness. Holden is caught in the painful ambiguity between the loss of his purity and his refusal to submit entirely to the moral degradation of the city. Simply put, he himself is now too corrupted – not only with a knowledge of evil but also a personal record of dishonesty – to enjoy the bliss of childhood innocence, but the ideals he holds are too high to allow him to assimilate with the rest of society. This leads him to be emotionally ambivalent towards himself, his life, and all the people around him. And so the root of his cynicism and listlessness is revealed: he is alone, and he is alone because he is disgusted with the only company he is entitled to.

 

To cope, he finds comfort in the past. He likes the museum because its placement of the exhibits never changes, and the carousel because it plays the same old music every time. Staples of the New York childhood experience, they are reminders of a time when he was pure.

 

His relationship with immorality is further embodied in two women: Jane Gallagher and Sally Hayes. Jane Gallagher is his childhood friend, a relic of his past; she represents the innocence of childhood that he lost. Meanwhile, Sally Hayes is known to be phony and promiscuous; she symbolizes the dishonesty and the sexual indulgences of the city. Throughout the book, Holden repeatedly has the urge to call Jane, but always winds up only having the courage to contact Sally; this encapsulates both his longing for childhood and the irreversible plunge into adulthood that renders him unfit to be in Jane’s company again. This also explains his reaction when Stradlater asserts that he had “given her the time”. Of course, Jane may no longer be the image of absolute purity that she once was, but she remains one of Holden’s last connections to that state of blamelessness. And because she is so sacred to Holden, he cannot accept that Stradlater had made love to her. It’s not a case of first love’s jealousy. It is a desperate reaction to an infringement on innocence.

 

For all his misery and immorality, Holden finds redemption in his role as a sort of guardian in his younger sister’s life. The hopeless narrative takes a turn when Holden expresses that he wants to be the catcher in the rye, a person who watches the children play in a field on a cliff and keeps them from falling off the edge. He wants to be a protector of innocence, the type of person who wasn’t in his life when he was a child. He regards his sister’s innocence with the utmost importance, watching over her at the carousel, and losing his temper when he finds obscenities written on a wall at her school.

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This trope, in my humble opinion, is the crux of the novel’s poignant power: to have lost something forever, and to find your only solace in protecting what belongs to someone else. For, in protecting his sister’s childhood, Holden increases his proximity to innocence, but never attains it. He is burdened always to be within reach of childlike blamelessness, without any hope of recovering his.