Boredom in the Rye

Christina Bonvicin
April 26, 2009
The Catcher in the Rye

I’m a reader. I do consider myself to be a reader, though books, as of late, have not held my interest long. I’ve read Nora Roberts, James Patterson, J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, and many other random authors. For some reason, The Catcher in the Rye isn’t my kind of book. The pace is slow and boring all throughout the beginning and middle. Personally I think the beginning is the most important part of a book. It’s the exposition, gets the main character, at least, set up so his or her story can be told. When the beginning is boring, my mind automatically goes “Oh God, here we go,” and settles into auto-pilot for the next however many minutes I’d be reading for. It’s really not fun, especially when it’s a book I have to read for school. Then I know I’m just set up for failure from the beginning. Just because of how tear-worthy boring the book was from the beginning.

That’s not the only thing. Once you do start reading the book you start to see things. Like how the main character and narrator, Holden Caulfield, likes hardly anything or anyone. He doesn’t like people that are bores and who are superficial. He doesn’t like phonies, either, nor people who are insecure. He doesn’t like too many people. Like his sister, Phoebe, says in chapter 22: “You don’t like anything that’s happening.” This was after Holden talked about Pencey Prep, his school, and the things that went on there. Phoebe challenged Holden to find one thing that he liked a lot, and then one thing that he would like to be. Holden didn’t even answer the question about what he would like to do with his life, he just rambled on about lawyers.

Personally, I think the things he likes are his family, which really aren’t things but people, and his deceased brother’s baseball glove. And this one girl, Jane Gallagher, who again isn‘t a thing but a person. He hasn’t seen the girl in a couple of years, but yet when his roommate at his school, Stradlater, says he has a date with her after the school’s football game, Holden suddenly is thinking about her all the time, in between the random topics of his mind.

Which is probably another reason why I can’t stand the book. Holden rambles. And he rambles randomly. He reminds me of myself. I hate when that happens. I’d like to think I’m not as bad as he is, but I know I can be worse. When I’m in the mood I can drone on and on about the most pointless of topics. When I’m in the mood, of course. But Holden seems to always be in the mood to ramble. I guess it’s logical for J. D. Salinger to have written it that way, as it is a first person point of view, so you are seeing things through the narrator’s mind, how it would happen in his mind. Doesn’t make it any less annoying though. Not at all.

Oh, and another thing. What I really do not like about this book is how he’s always taking about how fine a girl is or how cute she looks or who’s giving whom “the time.” In a teenage guy’s point of view I should have expected as much, but it’s still rather annoying because I’m a girl and I don’t want to hear about it. I love romance. There’s nothing romantic with someone talking about sex and how sexy people are. There really isn‘t. It‘s disturbing to read, since I’ve never read a book like this. I don’t even want to hear about it in real life, so why would I want to read it in a book? I don’t know which is worse, reading about it or listening to it. Both are equally as disturbing and really shouldn’t happen. But again, like I said, the book was written in a male teenager’s mind, so there really was nothing less I could expect.

In the end, I really did not like this book. I have an extremely short attention span, as Holden seemed to have, and all the rambling that was going on in the book quickly lost my attention. And the book failed to recapture my attention, even when Holden got sick. I suppose that makes me seem cruel, but the book was just too boring for my attention span. Not even for me, for my attention span and I just couldn’t see liking the random ramblings of Holden Caulfield’s mind.

Focus on...
--- grammar.
--- my thoughts and ideas vs. your own.
--- flow / ramble of the piece.