Rating: 2/5
Holden Caulfield spends The Catcher in the Rye convinced that everyone around him is a phony, but beneath all the complaining, he is slowly developing something more valuable: worldly intelligence. His wandering through New York becomes an education outside the classroom, exposing him to sex, loneliness, adulthood, exploitation and the complicated realities of other people. Holden begins with a simplistic understanding of the world, dividing people into ‘phonies’ and those he considers genuine. Yet his experiences gradually make these categories harder to maintain. He starts to recognise that people can be both disappointing and caring, selfish and vulnerable. Even his obsession with protecting childhood innocence reveals his growing awareness that innocence cannot last forever. Holden may not exactly become wiser – he still spends a lot of time being spectacularly annoying – but his experiences teach him that the world is more complicated than the moral categories he began with. His real education is learning how to live in it.
