in Pinsker 99) I think Salinger is trying to show that all that glitters is not gold.
Salinger said in 1953: “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book t was a great relief telling people about it." (Crawford 4) From that statement we can deduce that he drew from his own experiences at Valley Forge Military Academy. What Holden thinks of these kind of schools is made pretty clear at the beginning of the book when Holden talks about the advertisement of Pencey Prep: “’Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.’ Strictly for the birds.” (Salinger 2) Holden doesn’t seem to think that prep schools are any superior to normal schools: “They don’t do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school.” (Salinger 2) Preparatory Schools DefinitionĪ preparatory school like the one Holden is visiting is “usually a private one, that prepares students for college.” (Wehmeier preparatory school) How Pencey Prep is being portrayed Is Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye a critique of the society surrounding Holden? That is the subject matter of this paper concerning preparatory schools, the dishonesty of adulthood, some important characters and the Museum of Natural History as depicted in the novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Why do you insist on having children read four-letter words in school? Why do you want to fill their minds with trash? Why do you want to destroy America’s children?’” (Pinsker 35) Jenkinson, a teacher and book author, received from an upset parent shows: “’You call yourself a Christian, but you’re an atheist, a communist, and a smut peddler. People who tried to ban the book often argued with the books language and said that its message was “trash” (Pinsker 35) as the following excerpt of a letter Edward B. It was banned in many countries and taken of the reading list from many schools. The novel was a highly controversial book from the day it was first published in 1951.
It is one of the best selling books of all time selling “more than 60million copies worldwide and has remained a stalwart on school curricula since it was published in 1951.“ (Longbottom) I think the reasons for its success are clear adolescents from today still can identify with Holden’s confusion with the adult world and his angst of growing up and changing. He captures “the pressures and tensions of prep school life, the confusions of late adolescence, the quest for a vaguely defined religious purity, or the contradictions that result when its protagonist too neatly divides the world into phonies and the pure spirit.” (Pinsker XV) Salinger succeeds in depicting the problems of a 16-year-old boy in a post-World War II setting. Having read The Catcher in the Rye one really feels like understanding the protagonist, Holden Caulfield.