Essay Example on Catcher in the Rye By J D Salinger is the best selling book

Catcher in the Rye By J D Salinger is the best selling book that has never been adapted into a film and living in such an image saturated world how a book like this has managed to stay relevant without a movie adaptation is a interesting question With movies and TV shows today it is hard to imagine a world without images We often have the bad habit of viewing books as poorly crafted movies the words only offering visual narratives in our heads It is as if we have strayed so far from language that we now solely base our opinions on a book through its actions we forget to appreciate it s pure unadulterated text Holden was aware of this he too lived in a image based world His opinion on the image saturated world that he lives in his unique colloquialism and techniques to create distance makes his voice sound authentic almost sixty years after the book was published Holden also lives in a world whose artistic field is so wholly comprised of images In fact he mentions his hatred of movies in the very beginning of the novel I mean he calls his brother a prostitute for abandoning book writing for Hollywood at the very beginning of the book 

Now he s out in Hollywood D B being a prostitute Salinger 4 Holden appreciates books and book writing he holds them to a higher standard than the crushing phoniness that exist in movies He says It s pretty hard to knock someone out except in the goddam movies Salinger 51 The fact that he hates the movies and holds word books on a higher level is unique and hard to find and is still applicable to today s image saturated world In the world we live in today we can appreciate a novel being carried on by nothing but the functions of plot Catcher in the Rye is a very novelistic novel only a fool would deny that there are ready made scenes and choices that are chosen to pull on our heart strings but the weight of the book is in the nonstop peculiarities in Holden s voice All these emotions and experiences that Holden writes about are obviously important he is in fact writing about the things that lead him to be institutionalized But the intensity of these emotions are masked by Holden s tactics of his narration he subtly hints at potential sexual abuse after a potential sexual advance by a trusted adult That kind of stuff s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid I can t stand it Salinger 213 We see many coping mechanisms that Holden uses some of them being the minimization of language and change in tense 

I mean the whole reason he is not standing down at the football team with his classmates is because he had just forgotten the fencing team equipment on the train and caused them to lose the big match without even being on the team Another example of Holden creating distance is when he talks about Allie he says The thing that was descriptive about it though was that he had poems written all over the fingers and pocket and everywhere In green ink He wrote them on it so that he would have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat He s dead now Salinger 43 A present tense sentence in a past tense novel the change in tense is the real gut punch at the end We go from imagining a kid standing in the outfield to knowing that this same kid is dead not that he died or passed away that he is in fact dead The present tense reminds us that the dead stay dead and that is how they haunt us