Anyone who has read J.
D.
It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep..
The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart.
However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself.
Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure.
There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices--but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all.
Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.
The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story.
Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.
The hero-narrator of THE Catcher IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield.
Salinger's New Yorker stories, particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme--With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children.
Anyone who has read J.
D
