/lit/ - Literature

Because it's not written for them.

>>12540054
3 murderers recommended it

real answer is because most normies only enjoy novels where they can relate to the main character.

>>12540054
because they're PHONIES

>>12540054
because they're dumb as shit. Also, don't even fucking pretend most of /lit/ understands it either.

Source?

>>12540827
Don't start going on about how holden is an unreliable narrator who rapes and kills, and eats every person he meets besides his sister.

>>12540054
They don't. It's often considered the greatest American novel of all times and is widely read in school.

You're a normie if you like it. It's given to you to read in school. Can't get anymore normie than that.

>>12540849
No. He's a young man that recognizes that he's not a teenager anymore, but he's terrified of growing up because he thinks of the adults he sees as being fucking miserable all the time. He just desperately wants things to not change, because tomorrow is gonna be worse.

It's the most clear cut, well written story about a teenagers existential dread and everyone is always "Oh, Holden is such a bitch, why is he so whiny all the time?" People just seem to fucking forget what it's like to be that age and IT BOGGLES MY MIND

>>12540851
I love Catcher in the Rye, but do you know how much stupid shit you're forced to read in highschool?

>>12540860
Only in Burgerland.

I only like it because I identify with all the characters but Holden

>>12540054
Because the defilement of the organizing institutions of life by humanity raises the question of the folly of life itself as constructed by the normie around one’s position in the celestial arrangement of automatic social functions. if this is interrupted in an insectoid people it signals unsustainable forms of sacrifice, no displacement can occur, a people become debtors to a molevolent nothing. All very spooky

>>12540054
They hate anything they are forced to read regardless of quality. Everyone in my class hated Hamlet when we read it.

Because they don't examine their life enough.

>>12540054
because holden is an autist and normies are repulsed by the idea of mental unwellness or anything deviating from neurotypicality

Thread announcement: stop using the politically correct ifunny sponsored word "normie". Normalfag is much more sustainable because normalfags would never adopt it for fear of being ostracized by their precious social circles for muh homophobia. Take back internet culture.

>>12540054
In all reality people just don't like reading books, especially if they're forced to analyze it for class.
>>12540656
this too

>>12540851
>Literary critics liking something must mean normals like it too
Nah. Some of the most critically acclaimed movies ever, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, ect., are hated by most people who watch them. (Note: if you tell someone that these movies are the best ever made, they will likely force themselves to enjoy them.) Why should this trend be any different when talking about books?

>>12541089

While it's true that making something mandatory automatically raises the likelihood for resentment, your classmates are also plebs. When I did Hamlet as a unit in high school, I distinctly remember liking it, thinking "oh okay, so this is what all the fuss is about", and that the class in general liked it.

Now great gatsby, there was a shitty mandatory book.

t. I went to a better high school than you did

>>12541150
This explains most normie behavior.

Catcher in the rye is a book for normies that think they are something special. Nothing summarizes that better than faggot OP saying "Why do normies hate The Catcher in the Rye so much?".

>>12540054
Because they want to show how mature and well-read they are by dunking on a book for alienated teenagers

>>12541640
Gatsby is great faggot, the first and last chapters are perfect
>Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone — fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
>I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

>>12541640
>I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.
>On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
>Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
>And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
>Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——
>So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

>>12540913
I read the book when I was his age, and knew he was a fucking idiot. Life is a game, and you have to play by the rules. I only started relating to Holden when '08 happened and the world decided to stop caring about the rules.

>>12540647
John Hinckley Jr., Mark David Chapman and who else?

>>12540054
>lit appreciates jd salinger now
lmao fuck off you faggots

i read it at his age and had the whole experience of not wanting to grow up or whatever and still hated the book because it was badly written and he was a whiny slut.

>>12540054
From what I experienced, normies tend to like Catcher. I read it when I was 15 for school and thought it was great, and it should be great for teenagers theme-wise. If you read it, for example, in your 20s and can still relate, with that being the sole reason for liking it, then you just didn't grow out of something you should've grown out of. It's a YA novel in its core, but with more artistic value due to being well written and I still like it prose-wise.

>>12542652
Robert John Bardo, and I believe Kemper as well.

>>12540913
Dude shut up. You aren't special for never having left your "oh my God responsibility" stage. I was coming of age when I read it and never once felt bad for him. I've lived a life honestly not too different from Holden and it sickened me the disgusting gay boy attitude he had about it all.
>>12542593
This guy gets it

>>12540054
they hate it because they see themselves in Holden.

>>12543741
There are certainly worse characters to see yourself in.

>>12542593
>>12543733
You both seem like self-hating fags and thus, phonies.

>>12540054
Holden Caulfield was the original doomer

A Clockwork Orange was a better coming of age book

>>12544211
Far to the opposite, I have a healthy respect for myself. But Holden LOVES himself as much as he hates himself. He just hates everyone else more

>>12544247
I think it's too dark for a 13-17 yo and not really a coming of age book

>>12544247
I wouldn't exactly say Catcher in the Rye is a coming of age book. Maybe it could be considered a coming of age book where the protagonist failed to, well, come of age

>>12543952
what's with the hunting cap

Probably because they have to shoehorn their own moral prejudices into everything to feel like they're a part of the pack. I can't help but think that people who have never had some kind of Holden inside themselves are half-dead or something.

>>12540913
He's a boring piece of shit. I don't care about what happens to him.

>>12540054
So did Holden get nonced or someone tried to nonce him? i recall getting that vibe early in the book from some older man he talks to