Re: H. Bloom and TCITR

Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Sat, 21 Feb 1998 22:06:55 -0800 (PST)

>     It scares me to death, the number of adolescents I have 
encountered who
>take Holden under their wing as some sort of model of heroism. I read 
Catcher
>as a teenager and was a little put off by Holden's finger pointing...
>Reading Catcher now I am struck by what a tragic figure Holden is, no 
matter
>how right he may be in his observations.



Still a bit of a youngun myself, I've still got enough distance from 
those years to agree with you.

Reading your post, I began to wonder:  Do you (bananafishers all) think 
that Salinger's intended audience for Catcher was the vastly 
disillusioned adolescent populace?  It seems to me that he intended the 
novel for adults who had been through that age and had survived it.  

So why, then, is Catcher so widely prescribed to American high 
schoolers?  Do you think this is a great mistake on the part of 
curricula-forgers?  God knows the Educators have shown their 
incompetence often enough--is it possible that they misread the novel, 
decided, "This'd be a good one for the kids"?  

Should, then, Catcher be reserved for the older, more equipped reading 
audience...?  Not Constitutionally, or anything, but theoretically.  At 
the moment, I tend to think so...but on the other hand, I "identified" 
with Holden and still survived, and now because of that early exposure 
I've come into Salinger's wider window on life as a slightly less 
puerile being.

Any ideas?

Brendan

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