What Everyone Misunderstands About 'The Catcher in the Rye'
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2024
- JD Salinger left a trail of clues in his books that, if followed properly, changes everything about how you read and interpret one of the worlds most popular novels, 'The Catcher in the Rye'. In this video, I walk you through the clues in his published and unpublished work, and explain how Salinger created a literary universe of repeated characters called the Glass family. Then, I propose a new theory about the in-universe writer of Catcher in the Rye, one that I've never seen proposed before, anywhere.
Source: I have a Salinger tattoo (no, not from Catcher in the Rye) and I've been reading Salinger since before I learned how to read.
Pls like, sub, throw any comments or questions at me and I'll respond! Thank you!
Segments
00:00 Background on JD Salinger
01:53 JD Salinger's Hidden Literary Universe: The Glass Family
03:53 Catcher in the Rye's In-universe Writer
04:33 A New Way to Read Catcher in the Rye
06:33 Why Salinger Regretted Writing Cather
08:46 Theory: D.B. Caulfield Wrote Catcher in the Rye
11:04 Conclusions
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What No One Cares about Anymore, If They Ever Did
I have a book called the ocean full of bowling balls and other stories and it has a lot of stories by random glass family members (mostly buddy) and some from holden and db
good video
Have u looked into the connection of the last name carpenter. It is referenced in multiple stories, i thought there was a ms. Carpenter in ugly wiggly in conneticut but i couldnt find it when i looked. Also the name gallagher is mentioned in another short story about a company’s name but im pretty sure its just salinger using the same name, maybe it was common at the time
Fun synthesis. However, what do you propose as the thing that “everyone misunderstands about Catcher?”
that catcher is part of buddy glass's oeuvre and can be interpreted as a reflection of the glass family dynamics instead of just as a standalone novel
@@LitLit99 Got it.
I think it’s a real shame that Salinger included that winking line in Seymour: An Introduction implying that Buddy Glass wrote Catcher. I think this idea was a retcon by Salinger that allowed him to distance himself from his wildly successful novel. And it really bugs me.
@@CraigJayDoubleYou i agree with you! i definitely think Salinger was pained that he had published a novel that didn't fit in with the glass family structure. i think thats the foundation of his hatred of Catcher and its why he tried to shoehorn Buddy into catcher near the end of his career.
SLU: Salinger Literary Universe
this'll be the name of my next video on the subject
@@LitLit99 Do you think that the modern penchant for developing media properties in this way (everything is a franchise) encourages this kind of re-evaluation of older authors' catalogs? I think we can all think of authors who allude to their own work & characters across books (Salinger, Vonnegut, PKD come to mind). But I don't know that I would ever really have tried to read any of these with the understanding/assumption of the different books taking place in the same or overlapping realities, so to speak. Whether or not it was ever the authors' intentions that we would read the books like this, do you think this something modern audiences have been conditioned to do by the media landscape of the last ~20 years?
@@handyandy58_ this is a great question and i appreciate you asking it. it depends on context. i genuinely believe salinger wanted us to read his work this way, which is why he was so controlling over what got published and why all the dates line up across all his work perfectly (mostly). the For Esme example (covered at 3:41 in this video) is a great example of a detail that he wouldn't include if he didnt want us to look at his work this way. there's no point to doing these things if Salinger doesnt want us to notice them. i dont think this is what other writers wanted - vonnegut, for example, has character references that seem much more random and cutesy im not sure if the character names and qualities line up across stories but as a reader, i dont care much because characters are not really my focus when reading vonnegut. another good example is philip roth - roth writes in nathan zuckerman as our in-universe narrator for some roth novels, but mostly because zuckerman gives us some perspective on the other characters, which usually helps contextualize roths themes like class, religion, race and social standing. i wouldn't say that zuckerman is a focus for roth, he's more of a means to an end. IMO the glass family was 'the end' for salinger, not the means.
@@LitLit99 I'll be honest and admit that though I have read Catcher, 9S, and F&Z, it has been over a decade since doing so in a college lit class. So to your analysis, I am at least convinced with regards to Salinger that it is his intent to be read this way. As you bring up in the video, it's not an analysis that is made often and so I was unfamiliar with such a perspective.
I think I am just intrigued that despite being published 60+ years ago, the books as a collection lend themselves to an analytical framework that I consider to be a 21st century development originating from corporation-driven commercial pop culture. By that I mean the practice of trying to figure out what was "really" happening between different works or in a greater meta-story, using references, allusions, so called "easter eggs," etc. from the different works to support the analyses & theses. There's probably some argument that this goes back a ways before 2000 (say with some comics and some things like Star Wars), but I'm of the school of thought that thinks this really gathers steam with the late 90s/early '00s drive to make everything a multimedia franchise and the proliferation of the web as a discussion medium in the 00s.
Of course now many books & media are created with this in mind and play into it (e.g. the MCU, hence my original joke), but of course Salinger predates all of this. And I certainly don't think Salinger did this for the same commercial goals as we see these days. Maybe this is a subject for a whole video, but I am curious if there is evidence or an argument to be made about what he believed he could achieve through creation of this sort of "literary universe" when the books aren't exactly all telling a single story like a normal series.
@@handyandy58_ glad i was able to convince you : ). i do feel like Salinger maintains a certain relevancy, he was pretty ahead of his time. he's gone but definitely never forgotten, he was just a character in Bojack Horseman, huge influence on modern artists like wes anderson (royal tenenbaums - boo boo tannenbaum in nine stories). i would love to make a video focused on just his literary universe alone but i personally believe that this was all part of his almost absurd, self-flagellating pursuit of pure art, as i mention in the video. i think he thought he could be a 'true poet' if he created a family that was entirely self-contained in his novels and used the different stories across his books to create depth. i think thats why he wrote so constantly, because he was constantly imagining a world in which these characters lived. the more immersive and real, the more pure it was, to him.
I dont think salinger planned this all out like you get at in your video. I think he just wrote so much and was really attached to a lot of characters that he wrote a bunch of stories with them, sometimes changing their first names and keeping their last names, or the other way around, like youll read a story about a random guy at a party and his name is holden or caulfield or something but its some nerdy guy who is not the real holden, idk. Have u read hapworth 16 1924, its like 50 pages long and is mostly young (really young) seymour writing to his parents aboutbthe strangest stuff and he makes so many suggestions about franny and zooey and buddy, its pretty boring because he writes in the way you write when you pick words that sound as intelligent as possible, which i guess a kid, no matter how smart he was, is still immature and would do something like that to sound older, but anyways, once in a while he’ll write about someone and its so interesting or that story of him on that cart when he got his leg broken and rode on the back of the guys motorcycle
i agree that this is true for the caulfield stories an salingers early work, in general, but i do think that he planned it for the Glass family. i believe its why he wrote so much but published so little. salinger was a true obsessive, and the glass family was his focus. there's simply no reason to do the things he does if he didn't have it planned. lets take Hapworth as an example, which i have read and also truly did not enjoy. in the intro to hapworth, buddy/salinger writes "I happened to tell Bessie that I had been working for several months on a long short story about a particular party, a very consequential party, that she and Seymour and my father and I all went to one night in ". Later, in Seymour's letter, seymour writes: "At this party, entirely in the night time, we will meet a man, very over- weight, who will make us a slightly straightforward business and ca- reer offer at his leisure; it will involve our easy, charming prowess as singers and dancers...". what could this be? well in Seymour: An Introuction, Salinger explicitly states that Seymour and Buddy first went on the radio show 'Its a Wise Child' in 1927, which the entire glass family goes on. that's no coincidence, the party referenced in 1926 has to be when seymour and budy met the radio guy who put them on the show. never stated explicitly, only something that can be realized by lining up the dates, and the dates line up perfectly. salinger's work is absolutely full of clues like this. there's simply no point to writing in these little nods that take up space and ultimately take away from the stories, if you don't want them to line up like they do.
@@LitLit99 Oh, I think this is entirely true for the Glass family. I was alluding to the connections you made between catcher and holden being seymor or buddy or something. But I agree, the Glass lore is very extensive, and I also am very interested in it, I think it is so cool. I think Salinger published so little because he was not satisfied with them. Maybe more of the ones he was satisfied with were Glass ones. Who is your favorite Glass family member. Mine is Franny, she is so much like holden its insane. i kind of think she is like pheobe and zooey is like holden, but salinger just makes really relatable characters who are very specifically like-minded. I never met anyone irl who actually understands Holden like I do.
@@ethan610 happy to meet another salinger lover : ). buddy is my favorite. i agree with your conclusion that zooey is like holden!