Breaking The Code To The Catcher In The Rye discussion

I often write threads about why i love this book. I thought i would start a thread here with some of the comments that i have left:

Madeline,
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

When i first read this book i was hugely disappointed. How could this be a "classic". I nearly chunked it in the garbage.

I changed my mind when a teenager i asked said he would read it again. I thought i must have missed something. I slogged through the book again. Right at the end there is a carousel that is playing the song"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes". If you are not familiar with this song i invite you to listen to it. It is not a happy song.

In fact it was recorded at Abby Road during the war to play to the Germans at the end of the war.

Salinger had a rough assignment during the war! I think that The Catcher in the Rye is an allegory to tell us about War and Power.

Their is so much in The Catcher that it took Salinger 10 years to write it.

Hint, the first paragraph mentionsDavid Copperfield David Copperfield. Read the first page of that book and you will learn something about Holden Caulfield!

Now investigate little further. Read about the history of Holden. A car factory in Australia. Why were they tooling up to make war machines in 1931, way before Hitler came to power.

Oh yeah, who bought the Holden factory. Interesting that every car mentioned in The Catcher is by this car manufacturer, except one. Can you remember which one and what country that car was from.

There are references to books and movies in The Catcher. You must read and watch them all if you are going to piece the "code" together. Why did Salinger have to write a book about ww1 and WW2 (and there is even some references to the civil war) in code?

Because it was a popular war and the victors get to write the history, but Salinger saw a different side to war. Truth is short change in war.

What is also interesting is that Salinger went to Poland for his family business interest before the war. What was he doing?

Read The 39 Steps
Pheobe watched the movie 10 times. Both the movie and the book are reference in The Catcher (like how he got a good goodbye)

Or just for fun read Romeo and Juliet from Holden's point of view. Reason everything through the filter of WW1 and WW2.

But the most frustrating thing was the amount of time he spent talking about ducks. Give me a break. Went through the whole book looking for an explanation....
Then i Google ed

WW2 ducks

Go ahead read about it....who made them. Starting to see the point of the book? Brilliant!

Jeffrey wrote: "could take or leave the violence. The People Hunting Hat and the swearing...that's gloss. That's Salinger painting a portrait of the rebellious teenager, necessary only for getting his message across and nothing more...."

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...


The People Hunting Hat ...
That section made sense to me. After seeing this book in light of the two wars and references to classics or classic films, music etc. The literary reference here is Bambi

If you have only seen the movie and never read the book you have no idea what Bambi is about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi...
"With World War II looming, Max Schuster aided the Jewish Salten's flight from Nazi Germany and helped introduce him, and Bambi, to Walt Disney Productions.[4] Sidney Franklin, a producer and director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, purchased the film rights in 1933, initially desiring to make a live-action adaptation of the work.[5] Deciding such a film would be too difficult to make, he sold the rights to Walt Disney in April 1937 in hopes of it being adapted into an animated film instead. Disney began working on the film immediately, intending it to be the company's second feature-length animated film and his first to be based on a specific, recent work.[32]

The original novel, written for an adult audience, was considered too "grim" and "somber" for the young audience Disney was targeting, and with the work required to adapt the novel, Disney put production on hold while it worked on several other works."

Bambi was "hugely popular" after its publication (1923 in English in 1929.),[17] becoming a "book-of-the-month" selection and selling 650,000 copies in the United States by 1942.[18] However, it was subsequently banned in Nazi Germany in 1936 as "political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe."[17] Many copies of the novel were burned, making original first editions rare and difficult to find.

How did Felix Salten know how the Jews were going to be treated when he wrote the book? Does it foreshadow the exodus to Palestine?

So why does Holden wear this hat and claim that it is a people shooting hat. Also all through the book he has the hat one way, as a catcher for baseball and the other way as a people shooting hat.

Hmm...
In light of WW2...

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden

"Holden, formally known as General Motors Holden, is an Australian automobile importer and a former automobile manufacturer "

Every car except one mentioned in The Catcher is a GM car.

The one his brother, DB.

http://eoddata.com/stocklist/NYSE/D.htm

Who drove a Jaguar. A little English job. LOL.

Churchill, Hitler and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

Think i am reading to much into this book don't you?
But Salinger sets this up in the first sentence, when he says this isn't a David Copperfield kind of story. (Which is why i can't understand why everyone interprets it as an teenage angst. He tells you he is not writing a biography.) But if you read the first page in David Copperfield you find out about Holden Caulfield. And you may believe, as i do that the whole angst that everyone always talks about, (which to me has always reminded me of the Emperor's New Clothes fairytale) is really a veil to hide what Salinger knew about the orchestration of WW2.

"Ducks"<\b>

one GM machine you may not have seen the first time you read The Catcher :

https://www.military.com/veteran-jobs...