One of the greatest novels ever written and it has much more depth than most people give it credit for.

I’ve read a lot of scholarship about it and I teach it to 11th graders and am going to pair it with AP Lit students’ reading of Hamlet for the first time this year, contrasting two different characters who are privileged but affected psychologically by trauma.

I once had a student argue that the whole novel is essentially an allegorical war novel, and Holden says on chapter 3 his favorite books are all essentially books that don’t glorify violence or war. But this book shows the psychological violence that war and cruelty creates. Admittedly we were watching the movie Rebel in the Rye while going along with the novel, so that added to it. But I thought that was interesting. Essentially the school and NYC are just stand ins for battlefields and the military etc.