............."Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."
In that third commandment, you have the summation of one of the primary arguments
about the "immorality" of The Catcher in the Rye. Besides that, its
critics will boast the other "moral hazards" of J.D. Salinger's novel:
vulgarity, sex, alcohol, etc. Obviously, they would say, any novel that contains
all of these together can be up to no good. What these critics miss, though,
is the key elements of both context and meaning. The Catcher in the Rye is hardly
your modern movie; examining it as if it did operate exclusively on such superficial
levels is not only ignorant, it's quite simply incorrect. Instead, the novel
is rich with detail after detail of significance that serves to artfully and
entertainingly jolt its readers into thinking about what morality really means.
Imagine everything you knew up until now was wrong. Imagine everything you've
accepted as moral was really immoral. Imagine that you've lived your entire
life as a prostitute of society, mindlessly accepting their values without thinking
about your own values. Small wonder, then, why The Catcher in the Rye is considered
such a dangerous novel. Anything that criticizes conformity to the mainstream
will be criticized by the mainstream, that so blindly, but no less passionately,
argue the deprivation of ethics in The Catcher in the Rye. In actuality, J.D.
Salinger is careful to maintain that while certain actions are immature, it's
the deeper level of ethics that are moral: consciousness, love, innocence and
purity. Not a single "immoral" thing in The Catcher in the Rye is
gratuitous, because everything serves to contribute to the greater themes of
morality throughout the book.
............So what are the reasons Salinger included the superficial depictions
of immorality that are the source of so much criticism? For one, it's to make
that distinction that Holden is immature. For example, in the scene with the
prostitute, Holden says: "I sort of figured this was my big chance, in
a way. I figured if she was a prostitute and all, I could get in some practice
on her, in case I ever get married or anything"(92). It's so obviously
immature and silly it's hilarious, and that's the way Salinger intended it to
be. The reader is supposed to realize that Salinger isn't saying what Holden
is doing is right, but that Holden is a 17 year old teenager; One of the main
themes of the novel is reality - a perfectly mature 17 year old teenager is
hardly real. Our society is hardly real either, and that is one of Salinger's
most telling critical points. As Anna Quidlen says in her article, "Dirty
Pictures", "All over America we have communities where parents send
their children off with popcorn money to watch Freddy Krueger carve up teen-agers
with razor fingers, and then are unnerved by Holden Caulfield's 'goddamns.'"
Another reason these seemingly superficial aspects are included in the novel
is for simple reasons of style and structure. The book is hardly traditional,
and this is part of that jumbling of pre-ordained notions of "proper".
It's just another one of the multitude of things in the book that make you stop
and think.
.............Thinking: it's something a lot of people don't do, and they don't
even know they aren't doing it. It is something Holden does, however, and that
is another factor that sets him apart from the society around him in terms of
deeper morality. He wants meaning to his values, to his actions, and to his
life. He wants to be connected to people, but he doesn't want to be another
drone in the masses. He wants to maintain his individuality; After all, he runs
away from Pencey Prep, the high school that so cleverly boasts that it has "been
molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men"(2). Holden also recognizes
that perhaps the mainstream's given values aren't moral, and that in many cases,
the masses view of morality is more hypocritical and superficial then anything
else. With regards to the show-off phony piano player, Ernie, Holden insightfully
comments that "people always clap for all the wrong things"(84). In
essence, Holden is saying that being a phony, being a prostitute, is truly wrong,
but the society is able to ignore these because of the superficial values they
have set or accepted for themselves as right. Holden can't stand phonies…it
just "kills him". But even phonies Holden might be able to tolerate
- if it wasn't for all the corruption, hate and disgustingly putrid character
underlying the "good and proper" morals of those same phonies.
The opposite of corruption, hate, and disgustingly putrid character can be summed
up in one word: virginity. And Holden says it straight out: "If you want
to know the truth, I'm a virgin"(92). Virginity, though, is symbolistic.
It is the physical form, but more important is what it represents: purity and
innocence. Holden idealizes and glorifies innocence, beauty and true spirituality,
but can find no trace of their existences in the adult world. Morality isn't
merely a matter of, "say the right thing, do what you're supposed to do
(as defined by society), and follow the Ten Commandments." True morality
is much, much deeper. True morality is what exists in Holden's heart and in
his head: the love of purity. An extremely obvious and outstanding example of
this occurs in the scene where Holden defends Jane's innocence against Stradlater:
"…And then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in
the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open"(43). Here you
have Stradlater, completely ignorant to the feelings of others and the spirituality
of love - the type of guy that "[doesn't] even care if a girl kept all
her kings in the back row or not"(44) - and then you have Holden, attempting
to martyr himself to protect the innocence and spirituality of love. Holden
exemplifies here, as well as elsewhere, the greatest irony of the moral/immoral
controversy: He wants to be the "catcher in the rye"; He wants to
protect innocence. What could be more moral? Even if Salinger didn't have the
reasons he had to put in the other elements he did into the novel, for this
idea, and this idea alone, the novel has both literary and moral merit.
.............J.D. Salinger, through the voice of a "rebellious", "immoral"
and "unethical" teenager, is able to convey so much in the little
over 200 pages of The Catcher in the Rye that it can leave many of its readers
both awestruck and changed. He has turned the table around, switched the labels
from the teenager to the society, and in doing so, has evoked controversy over
the superficial vs. the meaningful. In doing so, he has caused people to jolt
themselves out of sleeping and begin to think about universal questions that
ought to be plaguing all of us. In doing so, he has contributed more to the
welfare of society than almost any mainstream product of society. Indeed, Salinger,
and modernism in general, have turned the way the world thinks upside down,
and has left society's future, like his novel, open-ended.