While I admire Salinger’s writing throughout in The Catcher in the Rye, I’m also, as I expressed in class, quite critical of the book as well. As Kyle from South Park remarks in the episode “The Tale of Scrottie McBoogerBalls,” I felt myself drawn in by a controversial texts, but found myself until the end thinking, “No, it’s still just some whiny, annoying teenager talking about how lame he is.” However, while I may have these sentiments, it does not change the collective experience shared by so many in reading Catcher. With that said, and given our reading on Catcher’s continued relevance in novels and popular culture, I now see “The Tale of Scrottie McBoogerballs” in a new light.
Whether one loves or hates Catcher, one cannot deny its incredible influence on post-war literature and media, obvious in its continued relevance. To this day, the entertainment industry relies on Catcher as a shared experience among viewers/readers, evidenced by South Park’s recent use of Catcher. While the episode down plays the controversy surrounding Catcher, and at times even its substance, what’s important to note is that is that an episode of such a mainstream comedy can rely upon Catcher as subject matter that the audience will “get.”
This observation leads me to question, as our reading did, what has made Catcher’s content into such a shared experience. Why do so many people read it? Why do people who haven’t read it and have no interest still know what it is about? Why can people who haven’t read it “get” the comedy in the recent episode of South Park? Just as the author of these weeks article, I can’t definitively answer this question. Catcher as a canon in high school reading must certainly play a role, but it certainly achieves a status greater than any other commonly required high school reading.
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