In JD Salinger's brilliant coming-of-age novel, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen-year-old prep school teenager recounts his lonely and transformative sojourn of twenty- four hours in New York as he experiences the falsity of the adult world while trying to cope with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie, and disturbing sexual experiences. Salinger, whose characters are among the best and most developed in all of literature, has captured eternal anguish. to become an adult in the person of Holden Caulfield. Anyone who has reached the age of sixteen will be able to identify with this unique yet universal character, because Holden contains pieces of all of us. It is precisely for this reason that The Dreamcatcher has become one of the most beloved and enduring works of world literature. As always, Salinger's writing is so brilliant, his characters so real, that he needs no artifice of any kind. This is a study of the complex issues that haunt all adolescents as they reach adulthood, and Salinger wisely chooses to keep his narrative and prose direct and simple. This is not to say that The Catcher in the Rye is a straightforward and simple book. It's anything but. We discover Salinger's genius and originality in his unique representation of universal problems. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that can be loved and understood on many different levels of understanding and every reader who experiences it will come away with a new view of the world in which they live. A work of true genius, images of The Catcher in the Rye are abundantly apparent throughout this book. While analyzing the city raging around him, Holden's attention is captured by a child walking down the street "singing and humming." Realizing that the child is singing the familiar refrain "If body meets body, coming through the rye", Holden, himself, says he doesn't feel "so down". The words of the title, however, are more than just a pretty ditty that Holden enjoys. In the stroke of pure genius that is Salinger himself, he aptly sums up the theme of the book in its title. When Holden, whose past has been traumatic to say the least, is questioned by his younger sister, Phoebe, about what he would do. what he'd like to do when he's older, Holden replies, "Anyway, I keep imagining all these little kids playing a game in this big rye field and everything..