Thoughts

Crawling in my skin

I found it funny but not very profound or generally significant. My life was way more 'dramatic' and I guess I can laugh at just a simplified snippet of it, portrayed by Salinger.

His angst and bitterness stems from sexual abuse so he's not really whining for no reason

If this rule was really inforced, this board would really be dead.

It really requires you to relate to Holden in a deeper sense than the typical, in order for it to be understood. Too many people can't generalize far enough past their own experience to detect the nuances that establish the actual conflict of the book. That's why I love it. It's a profound test of empathy-- it doesn't condescend to explain what the main character is feeling, to a pretty singular extent.

Holden is deeply traumatized. Alright, duh. But the character of this trauma is different than typical trauma. His struggle is, essentially, between the agency which is forced upon him by his position in life, and his deeply held desire to relinquish this agency to other people.

Holden has seen some horrible, horrible stuff. The death of his brother is the obvious one, and the distance this created between him and his parents, causing him to seek comfort continually from women and authority figures, is the bedrock of his personality.

However, on top of this, things at these prep schools he's been in have hugely exacerbated his dependent tendencies. The best example of this, because it's really a blink and you'll miss it thing, is that one of his friends at a previous school killed himself, right in front of Holden. It's obviously referred to a little elliptically, but the kid jumped out of a window and spilled his brains on the ground.

So Holden's problem is that no one is willing to provide him with support or reassurance over any of this. He's an outsider in a social and economic situation which demands that every man he an aggressive, power hungry goon with a lust for authority, and so Holden's repeated attempts to divest himself of authority-- a prerequisite for being reassured and comforted, essentially putting himself in the dependent position-- are either ignored, or treated as elaborate feints disguising his true lust for control.

This can be seen clearly with the cabbie. Holden asks him, very insistently, about where the central park ducks go in the winter. He wants the cabbie, who as a New York native, an older man, and a "man of the streets" is an authority figure, to reassure him that the ducks will be taken care of; but the cabbie can't conceive of why a person would care about the ducks, or why a person would want the cabbie himself to explain how they're seen to, because he can't understand why a person would show the vulnerability which comes with professing ignorance and empathy.

Cont.

Cont. From previous

All of the women Holden interacts with epitomize this dilemma, in a more intense way. Society says that Holden must control and be forceful with the women he engages with-- like in the line about how he's never gotten laid, because when the girl says no, he stops-- but he wants above else for them to adopt a position above him, a motherly role, to tend to his unease.

Anyway, that's why this book is great. It's a deeply personal story of a person at odds with society-- no doubt inspired by the horrors Salinger saw in his superlative time out at war, especially liberating the concentration camps, and his subsequent attempts to explain his feelings to people back home-- and, as such, can be spun out to a critique not only of a certain type of person, but also of the entire bourgeois-capitalist society, which so destructively entangles productivity with masculinity with aggression. It's a classic for a reason.

The ending is sad as fuck. The whole “I don’t know what I make of my life - don’t tell anybody anything, you’ll just start missing everybody” closing statement felt deeply true to me.

I get why people make fun of the book, but that ending is really powerful to me.

John Green-tier interpretation

Wow, someone who actually read and understood a book discussing its ideas intelligently without a hint of being a spastic.

You ever wish lit was always like this

but you copy and pasted it from reddit

Salinger is such a good writer it makes my skin crawl, but that's more relevant to Franny and Zooey. This is still great though.