Dec 29, 2009

The Catcher in the Rye | Literary Qualities

If The Catcher in the Rye merely detailed the awkwardness of a young adult growing up, it would still be valuable. But Holden's periodic allusions to his favorite authors and books, his often humorous and consciously unsophisticated analyses of those books and writers, and the novel's carefully ironic imitation of several powerful literary traditions help explain why Salinger's book is also a major work of American literature, closely studied by scholars and critics.

From the novel's first ironic sentence contrasting Holden with Charles Dickens's David Copperfield,...