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The Good Bad Boys. A generation or two of high school and college students, particularly those who have at least a sneering acquaintance with the Ivy League, still see in Catcher their hymn, their epic, their Treasury of Humor, and their manifesto against the world. A decade after first publication, the book still sells 250,000 copies a year in the U.S. Sociologist David Riesman assigns Catcher in his Harvard course on Character and Social Structure in the U.S., perhaps because every campus has its lonely crowd of imitation Holdens—doomed wearers of raincoats-in-December, who rehearse faithfully their Caulfield hyperbole ("It was the last game of the year, and you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win").
Holden is not merely a sort of Penrod of the Angst age. He is more nearly a modern and urban Huckleberry Finn.
Both Huck and Holden are in the same lineage of what Critic Leslie Fiedler calls the Good Bad Boys of American literature. Like Huck, Holden longs to be out of civilization and back in innocent nature.
Like Huck, speaking the superbly authentic dialect of his age and his place, Holden is a runaway from respectability, the possessor of a fierce sense of justice, the arbiter of his own morality. If one fact more than any other links Catcher to its generation, it is that for Holden—as presumably for his creator—the ultimate condemnation is summed up in the word phony. A whole, vague system of ethics centers around that word, and Holden Caulfield is its Kant.
But Holden is not a rebel, though he is usually called that. He longs to do good in a dream world. When he broods about dirty words on the walls where little children can see them, or feels compassion for a prostitute, he is not protesting against "the system" or the adult order; he is merely suffering from the way things are, always and everywhere, in a world of insufficient love. He is a self-conscious and sometimes absurd adolescent, but he is also a doomed human being of special sensitivity—not merely special, as Salinger might say, but Special. As such, he sets the theme for almost everything Salinger has written since Catcher. Most men know how to ignore, suppress or outwit the occasional suspicion that the world is really not to be borne—but the young, the mad. and the saints do not know the trick. To varying degrees, most Salinger characters, includinging those in Franny and Zooey, belong in these three categories. Strangely enough, the young, slightly mad saints are also full of laughter.