Holden Caulfield Censorship

Should The Catcher in the Rye be banned from being taught at high schools? J.D. Salinger wrote this novel about a 16-year-old named Holden Caulfield. Holden is your not so average teenager. He is more of a “woe is me” kind of teenager. Holden has two siblings and one dead sibling He goes to expensive private schools, but flunks out of them because he doesn’t apply himself. The main part in this book is when Holden takes a three day vacation in New York City to get away from Pencey Prep and to let his parents cool off after they get their letter about Holden flunking out of Pencey. The vacation is only three days long, but seems to be a lot longer than three days. There are a lot of places in this book that are extremely controversial.

“Children deprived of words become school dropouts, dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.” (Peter S. Jennison) Censorship could easily be one of the biggest controversies around the world today. The book “Harris and Me” by Gary Paulsen, about a boy who stays with his distant cousin Harris on the family farm because his parents are a bunch of “puke drunks.” Spends the summer fighting “commie japs”, hunting mice, and tussling with the rooster Ernie. This book was banned by the ALA for nothing more than profanity. If that’s even the right term, especially for today in our society. This book was taught in my sixth grade class and I have adored it ever since, but I was baffled to find out it

There are people who would like to see The Catcher in the Rye banned from our schools because it contains disturbing issues. In my opinion they are overlooking the message that J.D. Salinger was trying to communicate. In this novel, the characters exhibit a wide scope of behaviors from honorable to ignominious. The novel presents issues such as respect for religion, or lack thereof. As though these issues were not enough by themselves, there is also the subject of intolerance of others. How, may you ask, should this novel be allowed in our schools? Well, the answer lies deep within the symbolism of the novel,

The Catcher in the Rye was banned and discriminated for multiple reasons, but the prime reason was the containment of “excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language” and “overt sexuality” (“And Holden” Online; Kerr 49). Critics found the novel to be “wholly repellent in its mingled vulgarity, naïveté, and sly perversion” (“And Holden” Online).

Each character had a meaning and played a part in the novel. Holden Caulfield was the main character in the novel. He wasn’t very “normal”. I personally think he had trouble getting settled. In the novel, he had just been kicked out of the school Pencey, but apparently this wasn’t his first time.

Many schools throughout the United States have banned The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger from their curriculums. There has been much debate on whether or not teachers should be able to include it as a part of their lesson, and if copies should be allowed in libraries. However, without a doubt, The Catcher in the Rye should be apart of schools’ curriculums for anyone above elementary school. There are very few inappropriate themes, banning the novel would be neglecting the First Amendment, and would also ignore a good chance for teens to relate to a character their age.

There have been many cases of censorship for this book, one instance being at Venado Middle School in Irvine, California in 1992. Students were provided the book, only to have all the “hells” and “damns” blacked out. After parents, students, and media protested, the school eventually gave in and agreed to discontinue the use of the censored copies. The initial reasoning of this censorship was to dissuade the use of profanity in their students. However, according to Cursing in America by Timothy Jay, one of the leading scholars in profanity, the average adolescent uses 80-90 swear words in a day. Undoubtedly, some being much worse than “hell” or “damn”. It is not just in casual locations where youth swear, but it is increasing in the classroom as well. Students are

The story of Holden Caulfield, from the book Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, starts from from the point-of-view of Holden; where he is being treated for a nervous breakdown after being kicked out of Pencey Prep. for the death of his little brother Allie. While the book does have multiple instances of explicit language and suggestive themes, we think that the book is appropriate to be used in the 10th grade English curriculum. While it does have foul language and suggestive themes, kids in modern day High School have access to much more explicit and suggestive content. Also, even if it was written around the 1950s, both the difficulty and the timeliness is still relatively easy to understand and relate to.

Profane language is used very often in books. A majority of people believe the use of profanity in books is acceptable. However, when these books are exposed to high school students, many parents complain about it. Parents complain about these type of books because they do not want their children to learn negative words and get influenced by these devastating words. These words promotes negativity within students and sometimes it could lead to violence.

1. Historically, for what reasons have people objected to this book?   Many school administration have banned books like 'Catcher and the Rye' because of the contance of the book. Some reason why 'Catcher and the Rye' was banned of the "vulgar language, sexual scenes, things concerning moral issues" (Times 1). But to be more specific, a town in Columbus, Ohio banned the book from library and schools because it's anti-white (Time 1).

The use of profanity and explicit language in Of Mice and Men may not be the best quality of the book for a young adult reader, but it is not an overly criminal feature. It opens the readers to the perspective of life through an adult’s eyes and the frustration that the characters show is punctuated through their use of profanity. In Of Mice and Men, George said, “We could just as well rode clear to the ranch if that bastard bus driver knew what he was talking about.” (Steinbeck 4). Then, when George and Lennie get to the ranch, they hear a clear call that said, “Where the hell is that God damn n*****?” (Steinbeck 29). Michael Schaub talked about Mary Jo Finney, and how she did not like the profanity in Of Mice and Men. He said, “She and others objected to the profanity in the book, including

Censorship of The Catcher in the Rye For generations books have been banned from places because of the content of their pages. The Catcher in the Rye is no exception when it comes to this subject. The book has been banned from multiple schools, libraries, and even countries. Reasons of extreme language, sexual content,and topics which aren’t approved by parents, culture, and society. I feel that this book shouldn’t be censored and is not inappropriate for teenagers.

Supporters of banning say profanity can negatively influence the actions and thoughts of readers, especially younger readers that may not have heard or read many corrupt words. Huckleberry Finn, a book commonly inveighed for its use of contentious racial language, is commonly challenged for that reason. For USA Today, Martha Moore wrote, “When the younger reader is staring at that word five times on a given page and the instructor is saying, 'Mark Twain didn't mean this and you have to read it with an appreciation of irony,' you're asking a lot of a younger reader”. Granted, foul vocabulary is a challenge that academies need to address, but not through barring novels. Besides, if the reader is sufficiently mature for the book, they can still learn from it. For instance, some racial characterizations do not intentionally persecute people, but show the contrasting tensions between them, conforming to the time period. Again, the article “Huck Finn Navigating Choppy Waters Again” revealed, “The word is there for a reason… The word is terrible, it's hurtful, but it's there for a reason” (Moore). The racial epithets used in that book convey the attitude of Missouri in the 1840s when friction between African Americans and white people was rising. Additionally, banning a book due to concerns about the language is not beneficial to pupils because it prevents them from learning from other components of the book. “Often the organizations or schools that ban these books fail to see the book as a whole; they often center on the one page, the one scene or even the one word containing the offensive language or meaning and judge the whole book based on that one aspect,” according to an article by Adriana Lopez. She makes a sound point. A book contains a whole plot with themes that

The Novel The Catcher In The Rye was initially published In June of 1951. Ever since its release It has been acknowledged as one of the most controversial novels ever written In literature and has been banned and challenged numerous times. I am here to say that frankly, I do not see it as something controversial or anything worth really delving into. The entire novel could be summed up in a nutshell like this: An adolescent boy gets expelled from his school, and is too nervous to tell his parents what happened, so he decides to spend 3 days in Manhattan getting drunk, complain about everything, and make things harder than they need to be. Now just what exactly is a banned book ? “A banned book is one that has been removed from the shelves

J.D. Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye has old over sixty-five million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. The Catcher in the Rye is also one of the most cherished books in the history of American literature, and the novel is taught in many schools across the nation. Salinger’s book is filled with valuable lessons about growing up, but has been the subject of controversy for many years because of its frequent references to premarital sex, underage drinking, and profane language. The Catcher in the Rye has been banned several times in some school districts for its use of adult material, but it always seems to find a way back into classrooms because of its importance to American literature. Still,