In essence, “The Catcher In The Rye” is a story of a young man, alienated and alone, making a journey back home, to a more perfect past, to a time when his family were together and he felt loved. The setting is the capital city of the world, and winter, and freezing cold, because it is symbolic of the cold hard realities of big, bad the city as well as the harshness of Holden’s present.

It is about feeling that you are not being understood, even though you have a vivid imagination and wonderful ideas, and even though you feel different, the world does not accept you. In fact, the world makes you feel different in a negative way, and you feel as though you don’t fit in, you feel incapable of fitting in.

You get rejected, you are expelled from school, shunned by friends. The adults around you make you feel odd, even mad, and you feel isolated and lonely, so you wander through this cold, wintry landscape, going from bar to bar, looking for comfort or company, but nobody wants to know you. You end up feeling a nobody adrift in a cold, uncaring and violent world.

These are the feelings of adolescence, and that is what gives the book such a universal appeal to the young students who read it.

The book is also about reacting against authority, whether school or family, or the law. Again, you feel the whole world is against you, or you are against the whole world.

You are aware your family ties have changed; they are weaker or they are broken and you don’t understand why or how. The family loved you in the past, but you have let them down, or they don’t like the person you have become, and you are trying to restore that bond of former years, but it is impossible. The whole thing is doomed to failure, because it is idealistic and unattainable.

It is just as much a fantasy as the desire to turn your back on it all and run away to the backwoods and live a free and simple life without care, which is what Holden wants to do at the end of the book.

The story is about those adolescent problems of relating to others, especially the opposite sex, when you feel awkward, gauche, and clumsy. You are afraid of failure, and you try too hard, so that whatever you try comes out wrong, which just adds to your difficulties.

It is about the way an adolescent young man has powerful emotions and feelings, but is afraid to show them, so he tries to hide them beneath a hard exterior, a protective layer of not caring or a layer of aggression and rebellion. Because that is safer, because feelings make you vulnerable and vulnerability brings possible pain and is seen as a sign of weakness, so all sensitivity is crushed, but really you are extraordinarily sensitive and you are feeling all kinds of agonies and nobody cares and nobody understands.

That is the appeal of the book, and especially to those who feel alienated from society and those who feel lonely and lost.

And feeling like that, they want to change the world! They want to make the world take notice of them! They have to do something, and the more dramatic the better, to force the world to sit up and recognise them!