Look, the guy was controversial back when your parents were strutting about junior high school and trying to pretend all their pubes had grown in. He wrote a book that was massively, massively, massively controversial at the time. It was the first book to acknowledge that teens are insecure, horny, and deluded. Holden Caulfield was the quintessential everyman for the teenage set when it was verboten to acknowledge that being a teenager had some emotional baggage and angst associated with it (baggage being a metaphor within the story). By today’s standards it is pretty tame, but when it came out it was absolutely a precision guided missile targeting the fact that the emperor (the massive conformity of the time) had no clothes.

When I first read Catcher in the Rye, I thought that it was utter crap. Holden was a whinny asshole who wanted to pawn off any and all responsibility for his actions on others because he was clearly the victim, wah wah wah. I wanted to shout, “Grow Up!” to him (especially when John Lennon died because a psychopath read Catcher in the Rye). But… as I have matured, I have realized the Holden Caulfield in all of us. The creature that sytematically craves the validation of society while at the same time trying to break free of society’s limitation of one’s choices. While they are a walking joke to everyone who isn’t part of the movement/fashion, I understand how goths and emos come to be. People love feeling like a victim.

Holden Caulfield is you, he is me. He is seeking your approval, yet wanting to curse you down as “the man.” He wants validation, yet denies the validater their authority to give anyone validation. He is the confused and inconsistent voice of puberty and the road to adulthood. He is the single greatest examplar of indecision since Hamlet.