In JD Salinger's brilliant coming-of-age novel, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen-year-old elementary school teenager, recounts his solitary, life-changing twenty-four-hour stay in New York City how he experiences the falsity of the adult world as he tries to deal with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie, and troubling sexual experiences. Salinger, whose characters are among the best and most developed in all of literature, captured the eternal anguish of becoming an adult in the person of Holden Caulfield. Anyone over the age of sixteen will be able to identify with this unique and at the same time universal character, because Holden contains fragments of all of us. It is precisely for this reason that The Catcher in the Rye 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 doesn't need to resort to artifice of any kind. This is a study of the complex issues that plague all teenagers as they mature into 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, simple book. It's anything but. In it we are aware of Salinger's genius and originality in representing universal problems in a unique way. 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 they live in. A work of true genius, images of a catcher in the rye are abundantly evident in this book. As he analyzes the city raging around him, Holden's attention is caught 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 "that depressed." a nice little song that Holden likes. With the stroke of pure genius that is Salinger himself, he wisely summarizes the theme of the book in the title. When Holden, whose past has been traumatic to say the least, is questioned by his younger sister, Phoebe, about what he would like to do when he gets older, Holden responds, "Anyway, I keep imagining all these kids playing some game in this big rye field and all.".