Catcher in the Rye: Author's Values and Attitudes

It is rather difficult to really know what J. D. Salinger’s values and attitudes were since it is a fictional story which he is telling.  However, I could see how Salinger would have left some of his insight in the story, especially in the protagonist, Holden Caufield.  Holden is a teenage boy who is just about always down.  Throughout the story he is listing several things that make him depressed.  He hates the way his principal would avoid talking to some of the more unattractive parents, packing, hearing about three girls that traveled from Seattle to New York to see the first show at Radio City Music Hall, hearing someone laugh late at night in New York City, people applauding Ernie when he wasn’t playing good, thinking about his gloves and his cowardice, etc..  I could go on and on with a list of things that make Holden depressed but I have already proven my point that there may have been many things in the author’s life that upset him too and made him feel miserable.  Holden says that his sister, Phoebe, is the only one that he can really relate to and enjoys being around.  She says just what she thinks and does not try to act like somebody else.  Salinger probably also valued real friendships where he could just be himself without fear of being rejected.  When Holden saw “Fuc* you” written on Phoebe’s school wall he said, “It drove me damn near crazy… I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it.” (Salinger 108)  This and another of his statements, “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” (Salinger 93) suggests that Salinger cared about the people who are young and are being exposed to bad behaviors.  In the Holden’s mind, and possibly the writer’s, he is acting as the “catcher” to save the kids from bad influences.  An attitude that Salinger displayed is that everyone is crazy in some way.  Most of the story, Holden was describing how others are crazy and at the end of the story he says that he himself is seeing a psychoanalyst (Salinger 114).  This story was written from Holden’s point of view so it had a first-person perspective. 

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Print.