What does holden think about war in Catcher in the Rye?

It's not antiwar, so much as a challenge to see the world from a different perspective. The Catcher in the Rye was very unpopular when first published. Aside from the profanity, people didn't appreciate the book because it challenged the beliefs of the people who wanted to forget the past and relish the new beginning. The book took place in the late 1940s and into the 50s, right after World War II and right around the time of the Cold War. Most people in the United States during this time were very conservative. In The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence Under Pressure, Sanford Pinsker wrote that the novel is a "mixture of bright talk and brittle manners, religious quest and nervous breakdown, [which] captured not only the perennial confusions of adolescence, but also the spiritual discomforts of an entire age."