Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he’s been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists
My theory as to this book’s unusually polarizing nature: either you identify with Holden Caulfield or you don’t.
I read the end of The Catcher in the Rye the other day and found myself wanting to take Holden Caulfield by the collar and shake him really, really hard and shout at him to grow up. I suppose I’ve understood for some time now that The Catcher in the Rye - a favorite of mine when I was sixteen - was a favorite precisely because I was sixteen.
Admittedly, this is tougher to do with "classics" but it certainly happened in this case
Well, this was a pain to get through.