Good article! When I was student teaching I went through this book. What has always been clear to me is that Holden Caulfield is depressed over the fact that his brother died. This plot point is introduced when they discuss his brother's baseball glove with the poems in it (Holden writes about it in an essay and gets made fun of for it). Later on there's a moment when Holden reveals he knocked out all the windows in the garage. Salinger had some guilt and PTSD from surviving the D-day invasion. When I brought up that Holden was depressed, my mentor teacher, in his last year of teaching, looked at me sideways and said, "Holy shit!" The funny thing is that with all these high and mighty arrogant literary assholes, nobody ever discusses Holden's depression. He doesn't offer any answers, but sometimes when you're depressed, you just need somebody to tell you they understand. Thus this part: "Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”