Another book post so you become a little more cultured

Sometimes when you see the title of a book you have no idea as to what to expect since it seems the author was just drunk, high or both when he decided on the title. Sometimes you have to read very deep into the book to finally get to that passage that reveals the meaning of the title and once you read it you get this feeling of complicity; the complicity that lies in the fact of knowing that the author might not only not have been drunk, high or both but that the title he chose makes a whole lotta sense and it's actually very fitting.

One such book is The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. If you were to try to deduce the contents of the book based only on the title you'd most certainly be way off the real plot. For example, if you had asked me about the book, assuming I didn't have any prior knowledge about it, I would've probably said something like "Well, it's probably about a baseball player whose team was so poor that they didn't have anywhere to play so he collected pledges to buy this old out of use rye field and turn it into a baseball park". To which you would have responded "Man, you're dumb!"

In reality though, you'd probably not get many silly responses since this is a famous book and probably a lot of people have heard something about it. If you're wondering why it's so famous there's probably two main reasons that account for that:

1) It's controversial; the book deals with the psyche of a teenage boy, Holden Caulfield, and puts out there quite blatantly all of his thoughts and feelings. Holden smokes, drinks and swears profusely (most of his swears words are derived from the word goddamn, yes, hardly a swear word nowadays but back in the day...). Sexual topics are explored as well, including what Holden thinks to be a homosexual advance by one former teacher of his, so you might see why the book raised its fair share of eyebrow in 1951.

2) When John Lennon was assasinated, his killer, Mark Chapman, was found carrying a copy of the Catcher in the Rye and he referred to Lennon as the ultimate phony, a word that Holden uses almost as often as 'goddamn' in the book. There's even a conspiracy theory that claims that the book is used by the CIA to brainwash people and that Chapman himself was 'programmed' to kill Lennon because US government thought he was a threat.

Anyways, the whole point of this post was to save you the task of reading 179 pages of the book in order to find the passage that contains the title so I'm gonna post it right here verbatim, if you plan to read the book you can still read on since it won't really spoil it for you.

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be." Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye

Tha passage above encapsulates the whole theme of the novel. Holden speaks this words to his kid sister, Phoebe, who he wants to protect from all the 'phoniness' (or hipocrisy) out there. Throughout the novel Holden exposes his feeling towards all these phonies he encounters in his daily life, he thinks all these people are hypocrites and that they live their life according to what society and appearances dictate them to do. To Holden, most adults are phonies and that's why he sees himself as the protector of innocence, here represented by the little kids playing in the rye field by the cliff. He protects them by 'catching' them and preventing them from falling.

Since I don't really like to give out synopses of books, I'd recommend you to read the book since I obviously left out many important parts of the book and that Holden kid has some interesting ideas and views on the world.