Holden Caulfield

Actually, I'm not a big fan of Catcher in the Rye.

I think Holden Caulfield is a jerk.

I don't understand why people embraced him as a person when he's just this really privileged white dude who thinks he's a rebel when he breaks away from his traditional place.

And I kind of think that J.D. Salinger thought that as well.

He probably did not like Holden Caulfield as a person.

But, I mean, if you read The Catcher in the Rye, you could kind of read that between the lines.

Shoeless Joe is a really great book.

It reminds me a bit of Roger Smith in The Big O. Hathaway is very much trying to put on a cool persona as he whispers about how dangerous this all is.

Part of me sees Hathaway as a Holden Caulfield type, like a sexually repressed young man who fills in this lack of experience with things he picked up from pop culture.

And that got me thinking...

What if – all right, so when Hathaway does the bonding in part one, I didn't read that as an illusion.

And so I don't know, for me, again, just a great metaphor for what can happen.

Authenticity is a big theme in this, speaking of type three and exactly what you're talking about of like, who are we really and who's the version of us that we present to the world? I don't think it's any coincidence that the author chose to give Paul a monologue focused on Catcher in the Rye, which he even says in it, Holden Caulfield, first of all, is from that exact world.

And if there's one word that everybody remembers from that book, it's phony.

He's constantly harping on how everybody's a phony and yet how Holden himself lies constantly.

That being said, It is, I mean, for me, I guess it is, as we say here, porque no los dos, why not the two? I'm picking it apart and looking at things and making connections, but I'm still always wanting to enjoy it because that's how I'm bringing me into the conversation.

And also, and the more you do this, the... kind of bigger and weirder and like crazier connections you can make like one just recently discussing an excerpt out of uh catcher in the rye which we all read back in high school and it's been like the perpetual shit talked book since 1954 everybody wants to you know try and remove it from schools because it'll turn you into a communist or whatever it does i don't know um the section there where uh Holden Caulfield is asked to write an essay for like his roommate.

He's supposed to write about a place or a thing.

And instead he writes about his brother's catcher's mitt and the guy comes unglued on him.

Those are both very similar books.

Right? Like Holden Caulfield.

A first person New York kind of like misanthropic kind of thing.

Yes.