About
Coming Through The Rye is an online dialogue-oriented advice column. Its name stems from J. D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. For those unfamiliar with the novel, it is a novel narrated by a young man named Holden Caulfield, who deals with complex issues of alienation, identity, and of course, phoniness. The title of the novel comes from Holden’s fantasy of being a person who catches children as they are about to fall off of a cliff.
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
– Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye
Symbolically, Holden is saving the children from the evils of adulthood. Unfortunately, growing older is inevitable. Therefore, it appears we are all susceptible to “the evils of adulthood” – falling off of a cliff. We’re here to help – to catch those before they fall and to help those who have fallen back up.
Like most advice columns and agony aunts, such as Dear Abby and Oprah Winfrey (agony aunt to the stars), we here at Coming Through The Rye give advice to people who are handling a problem or dealing with an issue. However, unlike most advice columns and agony aunts, we do not believe ourselves to be an all-knowing authority or claim to be any such thing. What we do believe is that each person in the world has the necessary knowledge and experience to form an opinion for and offer advice to another person with any problem or issue. Where an individual asks, a community answers.
Our Mission Statement
The mission of Coming Through The Rye is to engage people around the world in a dialogue in order to help each other and ourselves.
Coming Through The Rye 