Josef Benson

“Like Huck Finn in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield decries hypocritical and destructive prevailing social realities tied to race, gender, and sexuality, due in part to his closeted Jewishness, ironically causing him to question his own moral character and sanity. Further, Salinger’s indictment of male-centered white supremacy through his narrator Holden Caulfield largely explains the vehement conservative criticism of the novel that resulted in The Catcher in the Rye representing not only one of the most loved books of all time but also one of the most feared and banned. The similarities between Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the reason why both books have so often been banned, center on each narrator’s personal evolution in rejecting white privilege. The one difference is that Huck’s rejection results in a political act while Holden’s results in a trip to the analyst. Huck decides to free Jim despite the pressure he feels from his community to abide by and maintain racial power structures. In breaking the law for a higher moral cause, Huck ironically surrenders to his own wickedness and immorality and abandons his privilege as an aspiring white man. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden feels at times perverted, crazy, and troubled for not categorically rejecting queer sexualities and because of his reluctance to seduce and even sexually assault women, both typical characteristics of mainstream guy culture. Mark Twain delineates Huck’s inability to embrace a racial politics contrary to his experience with Jim and illustrates how Huck decides that if freeing Jim means that Huck is wicked and will go to hell, then so be it. By illustrating the unjustness of condemning a man based on artificial”
― Josef Benson, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History