Serial Killers

Many people wonder why so many serial killers, as well as infamous John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman, have cited J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as such a huge motivation behind their killings. I decided to research this by leafing through "Catcher" CliffsNotes published in the late 1960s, around the time most of these killers were in high school. The results were surprising...but not in a “Whoa, that’s nuts!” way, more like an “Oh yes, I see” way:

CLIFFSNOTES ON:

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE - CHAPTER ONE

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we meet the narrator Holden Caulfield, a boarding school student who feels like he doesn’t fit in. Do you ever feel like you don’t fit in? It’s okay, we all do sometimes! Holden tells us he’s currently in southern California being held in an insane asylum. Ha, sometimes I think society’s the one that belongs in an insane asylum, am I right? Holden begins his story as a flashback from the December of the previous year, just after being expelled from Pencey Prep - most likely because he didn't blindly conform to their "rules" like a blind, ignorant sheep. Eat your grass, sheep, listen to the shepherd, sheep, do your homework, sheep, shower every day...that sorta thing. That corporate thing. Holden was kind of also expelled for flunking some classes. Then Holden visits Mr. Spencer, a teacher he liked.

COMMENTARY

The beginning of the novel is one of the most popular openings in American fiction. Salinger sets a very strong tone with his narrator, a tone that says, "Hey pal, I'm just like you. I'm your friend. No one else understands you except me because we're friends, man. And I don't care that you dropped out of college instead of going to law school like your rich, successful older brother Charles, a fact your parents rub in your face all the time. Also unlike your parents, I think it's cool that you ironically wear an army jacket to school as your 'thing.' I get you."

In this first chapter, we get a sense of Holden's isolation, particularly when he chooses not to attend the big football game. While he looks at the field from afar, he feels lonely, but he shouldn't because football's a phony game where men beat their chests to fool stupid, shallow women into having sexual intercourse with them. Besides, even if he did go, the football players would just make fun of his poems. Do you write poems? I bet you do. Really brilliant, beautiful poems that no one understands because they’re all phony. They probably make fun of your short fiction, too, and how it's dumb to write a science fiction story about a kid who ironically wears an army jacket and can read all the townspeople's minds, but when he tries to warn them they're all thinking phony thoughts they try to burn him in the town square but then the kid finds out he is actually an alien and his long-lost alien family comes to Earth and rescues him and takes him to their home planet where no one thinks phony thoughts. I bet the football players say that's stupid, but I don't think that's a stupid idea for a short story. Maybe they wouldn't think it was so stupid if they were dead.

In the first chapter, Salinger also uses some symbolism.