You’re welcome to write about anything in the novel that interested you, but here’s a prompt to get you started thinking:
Reaction to the novel and especially to the character of Holden Caulfield has been extraordinarily polarized over the years. An early commenter in The New Yorker called Catcher a “brilliant, funny, meaningful novel” and found Holden himself “tragic and touching.” The New York Times called the novel “unusually brilliant” and praised Salinger’s use of the first-person voice: “Mr. Salinger’s rendering of teenage speech is wonderful: the unconscious humor, the repetitions, the slang and profanity, the emphasis, are all just right.” Yet other critics strongly disagreed. Some early readers were “irritated” by Holden, finding him “completely self-centered” (The New Republic). Many later readers concurred with this opinion, with one high school teacher reporting a typical student reaction to the book in 2009: “We all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.'” Jonathan Yardley, reassessing the book in a 2004 article for The Washington Post, was especially vitriolic, writing that Holden is an “unregenerate whiner and egotist,” that the novel is overly sentimental, and that certain scenes made him want to “puke.”
In the light of how the novel has produced such strong and contradictory responses over the years, what was your own reaction to Holden? Did you find him believable? Did you feel sympathy for him? Did you like him? Do you think he works as a character? Can you speculate about Holden’s influence on later fiction and why he might be so beloved or so hated?