Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

1.  Holden Caulfield is a teenage boy who tells the story of the weekend he spent in New York before he went to a mental hospital for treatment.  He is sixteen years old and is bored of school and all the people around him.  He gets angry, as teenagers do, and decides to run away.  He goes to Manhattan and checks into his hotel.  Holden can't help but judge everyone around him, because he is a teenager.  He thinks that everyone around him are phonies because everything they do is not altruistic and they are just trying to move up in life instead of doing things that they want to do.  Holden swears a lot, because he is a teenager.  Holden is also very angsty, a very stereotypical teenager characteristic, because Holden is a teenager.  He also likes to talk about himself, because he is a teenager and the world revolves around him.  If anyone ignores him, it makes Holden feel like he is alone in the world and will more than likely think that that person is a phony, but it really isn't their fault because Holden likes talking about ducks in  a pond, which is a very uninteresting topic, so he should stop blaming other people and talk about something interesting if he wants people to listen.  This is when Holden puts on his red hunting cap which is a metaphor throughout the book about how Holden protects himself from the world, because yet again Holden is angsty and a teenager.  He buys a hooker and tries to talk to cab drivers but no one cares.  No one cares because he is a teenager and the world does not revolve around him but Holden never learns this or anything really throughout the novel because he is a teenager.
2.  The theme of this book is that teenagers suck at life.  Teenagers are emotional yet reserved.  They think that sharing their emotions is a sign of weakness and that no one would listen to them anyway so they stay quiet as a way to protect them self from getting hurt.  Holden demonstrates this throughout the entire novel with his angst and the red hunting cap.
3.  The author's tone was aimless.  This was not a traditional story with a beginning middle, climax, and  an end.  Instead it is just a lot of exposition.  The reader learns more about Holden throughout the novel without it really advancing any kind of story.  There is also no moment of resolving the problem because this is a realistic story where problems are just magically solved through deus ex machina, instead life just continues and the problems are always there.  The book also just ends with no real resolution once again because life just continues without any exciting ending.  This is because it was written in the 1950's during the Lost Generation, where people, after World War II, felt lost in their own world and just got drunk a lot (see Ernest Hemingway).  This led to a plethora of classic authors who wrote about a person living life aimlessly moving thorough life without any overarching plot line.
4.  The book uses tone, metaphors, characterization, dialogue, and irony to convey the themes in the book.