There's a little Holden Caulfield in all of us

I read The Catcher in the Rye my senior year of high school. I had never been so consumed, so moved by a novel in all my life. It was as if Holden spoke to me, or at least spoke my language. It’s strange because I was never rebellious or in trouble in high school. Looking back, after rereading The Catcher in the Rye since high school the older I get the less I can identify with Holden. What is surprising is that it’s not what Holden does, or how he lives his outward life; I was nothing like the rich prep school Upper East Side New York teen boy Holden was, yet that did not matter. It was what Holden said and how he said it that mattered. The circumstances surrounding what he said were irrelevant, just that he said things and spoke to me. It was how Holden didn’t care about a lot of superficial things, and let you know, yet cared the world for his little sister. It was the way he spoke to and spoke about her that really moved me. It was how he questioned things, like the ducks in the NYC pond that made me want to question simple things that to me were so important. The last two lines of the novel “Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” is still one of my favorite quotes. It was something about Holden’s humorous logic and brutal honesty that spoke to me in high school. It is still this humorous logic and brutal honesty that makes me love the novel and his character, yet cannot make me relate to him as much as I did then. I think it is the sense of being in high school and reading about someone the same age as you that makes their logic seem so similar to yours. It is how he viewed his life and everything around him that made me revaluate mine. I wanted to see things the way Holden did. I wanted to be as honest with myself as he was. Rereading The Catcher in the Rye now I wish Holden could have grown up with me because I think I would have liked to share his college and post college 20s thoughts on life and the world to see if they were similar to my way of thinking, just like I loved sharing things with him while in high school. I believe from the way he viewed things, his logic, and his humor there truly is a little bit of Holden Caulfield in all of us at some point in our lives. I have been told that you need to read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at a certain point of your life. This point may be different for everyone, but it needs to be when the book can most speak to you. I believe this of The Catcher in the Rye. For most it probably is best read in high school when Holden can speak to you at the time he is living these events, but overall, I believe that at some point Holden can speak to us all and that we all possess a little of him within ourselves. It does not have to be the same thing, maybe it’s rational, his humor, his kindness, or his quirkiness, but I do believe we all possess a little part of him within ourselves at some point in our lives.