Ode to those in red hunting hats

When I first read the Catcher in the Rye in the spring of my sophomore year, I thought it was one of the better books on the syllabus so far. Earlier in the class we had read books and plays like Fahrenheit 451, The Crucible, The Great Gatsby, a bit of Romantic lit—and just some of the usual classics that I had seen around on posters in the library but never actually realized they were considered great works of literature. 

But Catcher was different from the other prose.

Maybe it was the blatant sarcasm and cynicism coming from this young kid that I hadn’t really read anywhere else before. Or, perhaps, it was just the fact that we were reading a story told by a kid, who actually sounded like a kid, not like some books narrated by very adult sounding children.

Some of the book covers over the years. Thank goodness we'll never have to worry about the dreaded movie poster cover.

I liked the book as we analyzed it in class, and I ended writing a nice five-paragraph essay, I think about his Freudian egos or something like that.

But I hadn’t really connected it to myself. I had read it, agreed with what he said, had understood what my teacher taught, but I left it at that. I think maybe I was still trying to figure out what it felt like when a book is so good that it seems like what you’re feeling in your life at that very moment was pulled straight from the synapses within your skull and placed upon the paper (in fact, that moment was being saved for my last year of high school when we read Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood).

I like Catcher..... but not this much

But, the winter of my senior year, as a respite from college apps and portfolio submissions, I read it again. And, I realized it had grown on me, but in a different way.

What eighteen-year-old Alex noticed was much different from what sixteen-year-old Alex did. All of a sudden, Holden’s own phoniness was all I could focus on. But, for some reason, it made me like him even more. He just seemed so much more real. His oblivious hypocrisy was endearing, his childlike desperation to save the world was admirable. It made me realize how, really, we’re all just a bunch of phonies, how we all hold certain contradictions within ourselves.

This change wasn’t all that dramatic, I guess; I hadn’t gone from hating the book to carrying it everywhere I went. But, reading it a second time after I had gone through some necessary growing myself, I was able to appreciate Holden in all his phony glory all the more.

Hopefully more than my appreciation for this book has changed since 10th grade