The catcher in the Rye

[Inka]

I didn't know where to place this thread so I posted it here.
Since the title seems symbolic to me I wonder what does it mean.
Does it denote the main character as the "catcher" and the rye stands for the people and the society which he lives in?

And if we take it in the comparison with The Lord of The Flies does this mean that the writers wanted to show us that the society itself is evil but thanks to such people as Ralph and Holden there's still a chance that it didn't rotten to the core?

P.S: I know everything about the critics but I love to get everything myself and I just wanted to discuss it with you and to make sure that I'm right :cool:

[FoghornBellows]

I'm rusty on "Lord of the Flies". I believe Ralph was the paradigm of rationality. He was an attempt to maintain the civilized veneer that society supplies mankind. Beneath said veneer is an animalistic nature that the boys ultimately succumb to. Ralph was the bond of reason to nature: he didn't give into violence, savagery, avarice, etc. He was conscientious and attempted to maintain order among the boys. I don't know how far off that is.
As for "The Catcher in the Rye", Holden wishes to preserve the innocence of youth. He views youth as the paradigm of virtuosity and the adult world as hypocritical, threatening, and repulsive. He envisions himself as maintaining a field of rye in which children play. If they fall from the field, which is on a precipice, he catches them and places them back in the field. He is a champion of innocence, and detests the complexity of the adult world.
There are many ways to synthesize those two viewpoints. Hope they were of help.

[Inka]

Then, it's of matter of innocence. Yep, it helped, I never though of it this way.
Thank you for interpretation, as it turned out I was mistaken, perhaps, because of the translation of the title, 'cos in Russian it roughly sounds like "Over the Pit in the Rye" since it's hard to find an appropriate word for "catcher" and I interpreted it that way and the pit I took for the rotten and hypocrite society. The meaning of the rye stays the same anyway.
I still believe, that the translation grabbed the idea of the novel.

[McGrain]

It always struck me that the two bookends to the...book were the conversation he had with his proffessor type at the start and the conversation he had with his sister at the end. In the first place he's the lost man, the man slipping between the cracks in the last he's the man with the ultimate responsibility, that of protecting children.

It's about alienation coupled with goodness - the character is intrinsically good but without purpose, the desire to do good still firmly rooted because he's so untrammeled - inoccent, yeah, as above - but he's just had his first definitive failure. If true bitterness is just the absence of love, what happens to a lost man when he realises his fantasy is an impossibility? Keeping in mind who JD Salinger was.

Sorry for being vague on the details, it's been a while since I picked it up. Loved it at 17, not so much at 27.

[Inka]

McGrain

well, he must develop himself throughout the novel, that is what distinguishes a good book from the bad one. But what do you mean by "slipping between the cracks"? Can you explain it another way? I just can't refer it to our hero, sorry.

In other words, as far as I understand, you consider him as a discontented person.
Ok, this man will definitely find a way to escape somewhere where he can satisfy all his fantasies. I envy Salinger in a way, I myself would like to live somewhere in the depth of a forest with no people around and being a student I appealed to fairy-tales about the lone foresters. And he did smth like that, didn't he?
But the hardest part is to try and live with such people around and to keep yourself innocence, moreover to do right thighs and call a cat a cat. Don't know much about Salinger, but Halden didn't manage with it. Yes, he thought about it but in reality he behaved just like anybody else, other than talking and judging everybody. In that way can we consider him as a good character? Everybody can talk and do nothing.

[off]Don't worry about the details and I won't be worry about my English :)

[Brad Coelho]

The crux of Holden's discontent & ambiguous future vision seems to originate w/ this ‘protective mechanism’ of his. He finds fleeting pleasure in poorly constructed fantasies involving hitch-hiking, log cabins and get aways w/ a girl he has no real feelings for (his escapist ideas are so porous that even his kid sister can see right through them). His rationalization or labeling of such ideas w/ ‘I’m crazy, I’m a madman’ is an easy façade, but in actuality, he’s immature. He’s old enough to be faced w/ the harsh realities of adulthood and responsibility, but lacks the faculty and skin to face them head on. The innocence of childhood was stripped harshly away from him when his brother died & it seems he has yet to really transcend that event. He gravitates to children and their blissful worlds of museums w/ mummies, skating in the parks & scribbling in journals because he simply can’t answer the tough questions that his life has posed him (particularly, his teacher at Pency & Mr. Antolini). Instead of growing up, he scratches and claws at remnants of deluded fantasy and conjures a role for himself as the protector of innocent youth. Unless he finds a way to evolve & grow w/ this concept, it will continue to distract him from progressing as an individual, rendering him lost & he’ll inevitably flunk out of school number 2.