Catcher in the Rye is meaningless

Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye

Our life. It’s meaningless. Even if you find any meaning, it is still meaningless. Today, tomorrow, yesterday, after it is all over, after you are gone, after I am gone, it will still remain meaningless. I spent hours reading Catcher in the Rye. It ended. And then I realised I had wasted my time. It’s just so meaningless.

So meaningless, yet something about it, well, makes sense. Nothing happens but I remember everything. The main character just about spends the entire novel doing nothing. What do his parents do? Nothing. His classmates? Nothing. There lies the greatest thing about this book. Its ability to capture the meaningless and nothing.

Generations have hated Holden. Called him phony. Just a teenager. A hater. Are we too scared of him? Too scared to think we are him? I have ten terrible thoughts every morning, before having a good one. I was 50% Holden when I first read this book at 14. I am 75% Holden now, seven years later. What changed is that I stopped hating my aimlessness. I also stopped asking where the ducks go in winter.

Now look, I know what everybody will try to say and explain. That he found the meaning in being the ‘catcher in the rye’, in his sister. But it doesn’t really matter. Allie is still dead. And no one cares about his baseball gloves. Maybe I missed the point of the book. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Because JD Salinger is dead too. And people on The New York Times are calling him a ‘literary recluse’. People will say what they want. They always do. But maybe that’s why the best we can do is be a ‘catcher in the rye’, if not for others, then for ourselves. Yesterday I spent 48 minutes making dinner and never ate it. These things happen. When I’m 37, I come back home dead from work and pick up my knife because nothing matters. But then maybe I’ll remember Holden, take out some leftover cake from my fridge, and say fuck this, nothing matters. The difference is between those two ‘nothing matters’.