My initial impressions of this book is that it is pure crap. And that is also my last impression of it too. I'm glad I was never forced to read this in school.
My main issue with this book is that it is so negative. The main character Holden Caulfield hates everything. Even the things he likes, he will tell you over and over again 100 different things he hates about it. It never ends. This book only spans about two days of his life (no really) from when he gets kicked out of a prep school to when he hides out in a crappy hotel over the weekend, biding his time until he figures his parents have received the letter of his dismissal.
So first he talks about how he hates his roommate and everybody at the school. If he knows their name, he hates them for something. And he loves calling everybody a phony. I wish I had a dollar for every time the word phony was used to describe someone. I just think that this guy is just an asshole and no one likes him for obvious reasons. So instead of anything being wrong with him or his fault, it's everyone else's fault and they are "phony" because they aren't a rude piece of crap like him.
So he ditches the school because there's no point in waiting around and heads to his home town and crashes in a cheap motel. During this time he tries to call up several "friends" who he really doesn't like anyway but no one will see him except for one "phony prep dude" who joins him for a quick drink before ditching him. He also calls up an old girlfriend and takes her to a movie the next day, but he talks to her like shit and she ditches him as well.
The only person he truly seems to care about is his little sister Phoebe. She's a peach, but gets ticked at him for getting kicked out of yet another school. He sneaks into his own home and sees her in the middle of the night where they have this conversation and she guesses that he has flunked out again. She mad y'all. During this time he calls an old teacher that actually seemed to care about his welfare and offered him a place to sleep.
The only redeeming thing about this book is what that teacher tells him after finding out what his situation is. He sees Holden is heading for a big fall and warns him of it:
“This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”
As a man who has fallen and failed, this did resonate with me.
He also see him dying an unnecessary death and tells him:
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
I liked that.
So the books ends with him meeting his sister after school because he said he was just going to run away and wanted to say goodbye to her. She shows up with a suitcase wanting to go with him and when he says no she gets all mad. He makes up for it by taking her to the zoo and watching her ride the carousel while he sat on a bench in the rain. He promises to stay and states that that's exactly what he did. The last chapter avoids what happens when he actually does go home, and states that once you start telling people about something you actually start to miss it.
Yeah, that's it. One a scale of 1-10, I would give it a 2 mainly for the quotes I listed above. Beyond that, I see no point in ever reading this again.
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