Hi, I’m John Green and this is Crash Course Literature

and today we’re going to talk about The Catcher in the Rye,

the bestselling book never to be adapted into a film.

but there’s a religious injunction there.

The reason this has never been made into a movie is of course

because Salinger and his estate won’t allow it.

[spoilsporting FTL or Litigation as sport FTW?]

I mean, even most of Salinger’s covers are imageless—

has managed to remain relevant without a movie adaptation

in our image-saturated and image-driven culture is a very interesting question.

[but not one to subject TFIOS to, if you please]

And so today we’re gonna take a look at the pure and unadulterated text of

Now there are many ways to read a novel critically,

and next week we’ll take a very different approach:

We’ll infuriate J.D Salinger’s ghost by reading this novel in a historical

But today, let’s appease Salinger’s ghost by pretending

These days our artistic landscape is so deeply defined by visual narratives

on TV and in the movies that we can hardly imagine a world without images.

In fact, I’d argue that we have a bad habit

of seeing books as sort of cheaply-made movies

where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.

So too often what passes for literary criticism is

“I couldn’t picture that guy” or “I liked that part”

or “This part shouldn’t have happened;”

that is, we’ve left language so far behind that sometimes

we judge quality solely based on a story’s actions.

So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts

the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused

by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance.

But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate

and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot

but also from the language itself. [did things just get a bit personal?]

was aware of this because he too lived in an image-driven world.

on the very first page of the book, Holden calls his brother a prostitute

for abandoning bookwriting for Hollywoodband says,

“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies.”

And the novel frequently identifies itself in direct opposition to film,

“I don’t remember if he knocked me out or not, but I don’t think so.

It’s pretty hard to knock a guy out, except in the goddam movies.”

it is okay to say “Charlotte Bronte” if you are quoting the book in question.

But, now, outside of the text, I have to use “Charlotte Bronte.”

Stan, I know we have to do it for the schools,

but this prohibition on cursing is so Emily Bronte annoying.

Okay so if you’ll just allow me one biographical note here,

“‘The Catcher in the Rye’ is a very novelistic novel.

There are readymade ‘scenes’— only a fool would deny that—

but, for me, the weight of the book is in the narrator’s voice,

his personal, extremely discriminating attitude to his reader-listener.

He can’t legitimately be separated from his own first-person technique.”

Alright, but before we examine that first-person technique,

let’s go to the image-tastic Thought Bubble.

Catcher in the Rye is the story of Holden Caulfield’s expulsion from Pencey Prep

and his journey back home to New York City,

where he bums around for a few days trying to get someone to listen to him

and meaningfully respond to his fears about becoming an adult—

Holden has grown six inches in the past year

and one side of his head is full of gray hair,

both symbols of impending, inevitable adulthood

and its accompanying adulteration of innocence.

He’s so obsessed with and protective of innocence

that he can’t even throw a snowball at a car because the car quote

Over and over again, Holden tries to reach out to people

who might tell him that adulthood will be okay—

friends, old teachers, a prostitute, a nun, cab drivers--

but he can never quite find a way to ask these questions directly,

There are no explosions or car chases and certainly no skoodilypooping,

as Holden Caulfield is perhaps the first human in history

ever to pay a prostitute not to have sex with him.

sex or money or power or any of the dramatic stuff in Hollywood movies:

As he famously says when thinking about the Natural History Museum,

in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was.”

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Language, Voice, and Holden Caulfield: The Catcher in the Rye Part 1

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