GREEN DAYPopular punk rock band Green Day had a song in their Kerplunk album titled Who Wrote Holden Caulfield? Apart from the title, lyrics like “There’s a boy who fogs his world and now he's getting lazy. There’s no motivation and frustration makes him crazy,”
are also closely related to the books main protagonist. “The angst in many of Green Day’s songs remind me of the boy in The Catcher in the Rye,” says Tania Mulchandani, 17.***BART SIMPSONAnimated, yellow and just aged 10, Bart Simpson the boy brat from television’s longest-running animated series The Simpsons never fails to skate right over the status quo and tell it to eat his shorts. “Bart has done a lot of dumb things but he’s always managed to get away with it. He’s a lot like Holden Caulfield because though he seems to act tough and constantly slack off, he’s still a good child who loves his family,” says 18-year-old Julian Pinto.***VERNON GOD LITTLE Most reviewers saw the similarities between Holden Caulfield and DBC Pierre’s Vernon Little in his Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little. Both were teenagers and (Holden was 17 and Vernon was 15) and both had a bone to pick with society. Confused and misunderstood, both boys’ narration of incidents in their lives are troubling but they never fail to move their teen readers.***Chapter 27Starring Jared Leto and Lindsay Lohan, the movie Chapter 27 depicts the assassination of musician John Lennon by Mark David Chapman. Chapman is known to have been inspired by The Catcher in the Rye and was carrying the book on the day he shot Lennon. “I watched the movie because after the assassination, many blamed Chapman for ruining the genius that is The Catcher.... I wanted to see what went on inside his mind,” says Gulshan Talwalkar, 19.