What I found striking in the testimonials on How J.D. Salinger Changed My Life is the fact that most witnesses read The Catcher in the Rye for high- school or university classes … It was those “phony” adults in authority … who glommed onto it and assigned it. What happens when the sense of alienation at the core of your authentic self results from being told to read a book that you’re graded on? “Supervised alienation,” says a writer I know. Would they have even discovered the book left to their own devices? They’ll never find out.

Back around the time that Holden Caulfield first appeared in print, the neo-Freudian Erik Erikson suggested that excessively early toilet training may have undermined the sense of control and autonomy among a generation of Americans, leading to paranoia about Communist subversives and alien invaders. What about the emergence of a pervasive ironic sense in a later age? Holden Caulfield wasn’t ironic, he was desperately earnest. But could irony be the response of a generation that was prematurely alienated, as it were, from its own alienation?

Rick Salutin, in the The Globe and Mail.

I don’t agree, I think if the story had followed Caulfield (uncommitted) into his 20’s we would have seen his cynicism expressed through irony. You can only whine earnestly for so long before you despair and resort to bitter humour, right? Or something. It’s an interesting thought though.