Analysis of The Catcher in the Rye

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

I have read some books from which I can easily explain the things that happened there, but with this novel it was totally different because even though the plot can be summarized in just few lines, that wouldn’t be enough to understand what is supposed to be understood: Holden’s mind.

As the story progresses, we can realize that the narrator is Holden Caufield who tells the story from his own point of view; it is a first-person narration in which, to my mind, an interior monologue is used. An interior monologue can be defined as “a narrative technique that exhibits the thoughts passing through the minds of the protagonists. These ideas may be either loosely related impressions approaching free association or more rationally structured sequences of thought and emotion” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d). Throughout the story it can be seen that one Holden’s memory or emotion trigger another one, every description is delivered by Holden in full detail, and in that way we can know about his feelings and personality (because of the way he expresses himself), and at the same time we can know about his inner “confusion” and concerns. His thoughts and the language he uses are the ones which allow us to conclude that he doesn’t feel comfortable with his life nor with the people he is surrounded by. Everyone was “phony”. For example in chapter 2 he mentioned:

“One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. That’s all. They were coming in the goddam window. For instance, they had this headmaster, Mr. Haas that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in life. […]”. (p.13)

By phony he may refer to people who is always pretending to show off, or people who behave differently as he thinks they should, so they are losers. Phony is a word that he uses along the novel to refer to other people and criticize them, except to him.

Going back to the type of technique used in The Catcher in the Rye, it is a interior monologue and not stream of consciousness because the latest refers- according to the definition provided by Cambridge Dictionary- to  “a style in literature that is used to represent a character's feelings and thoughts as they experience them, using long, continuous pieces of text without obvious organization or structure” and this novel does have a clear organization.

"Interior monologues encompass several forms, including dramatized inner conflicts, self-analysis, imagined dialogue (as in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” [1915]), and rationalization". (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d).  Here, a passage of chapter 25 of the novel that best fits as a self-analysis:

[…] “But what did worry me was the part about how I’d woke up and found him patting me on the head and all. I mean I wondered if just maybe I was wrong about thinking he was making flitty pass at me. […] I thought about all that stuff. And the more I thought about it, the more depressed I got. I mean I started thinking maybe I should’ve gone back to his house” […] (p.194-195).

To understand Holden’s mind it is important to pay attention not only to what he says, but to the way he mention and express things. First of all, as I said before, Holden’s memories and emotions trigger other ones, and if we focus on form, he uses a lot of digressions- a literary technique in which the narrator shifts from the main subject to another one, and then returns. This technique is used along the whole novel since the events are narrated from Holden’s mind, and human’s minds never work in a chronological and logical way.

Also, it is present the use of flashbacks, a technique that interrupts the time around now to provide some information about the past. Here a passage as example:

[…] “Do you want to go for a ride on it? I said. I knew she probably did. When she was a tiny little kid, and Allie and D.B and I used to go to the park with her, she was mad about the carrousel. You couldn’t get her off the goddam thing”. (p.210, Ch.25).

From a more general perspective, I believe that another narrative technique present in the novel is Racconto, a narrative technique that describes past events extensively from a specific point, and progresses in a linear way until the initial point of the memory. I know that the story of this novel doesn’t progresses in the most linear way, because it is full of flashbacks and digressions, but if you think about it, the story starts in a specific point and ends in the same one.  Holden starts the story by mentioning that he is in a specific place (without giving much information, indeed) “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy” (p.1), then Holden tell us about him, and at the end – just in the last chapter, in the last two pages- he comes back to the present and says “ That’s all I’m going to tell about…” and gives clues to understand that he is in the exact place than at the beginning.

Another aspect to take into account in this analysis is the use of words in italics. Those words appear in that way when Holden or another character wants to emphasize the words in tone, but differently from an exclamation- and when you read it, you can imagine the way they mention those word, for example in this passage of chapter 17:

[...]“Did you ever get fed up?” I said. “I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something? I mean do you like school, and all that stuff?”

“It’s a terrific bore”

“I mean do you hate it? I know it’s a terrific bore, but do you hate it, is what I mean.

“Well, I don’t exactly hate it. You always have to-“ “Well, I hate it. Boy I do hate it” I said.[...]

Now, referring just to Holden it is possible to see that he criticize all people except him. He in a way lets us know that he feels alienated, lonely, confused- everyone and everything was banal. But at the end of the book everything changes, he doesn’t want to go away anymore… he decides to go home. Why do you think he changed his mind? was it possible to understand Holden's mind after all?

References

Interior monologue | literary device. (n.d) Retrieved August 12, 2016, from https://global.britannica.com/topic/interior-monologue

Stream of consciousness. (nd.) In Cambridge Dictionary. Retrieved  August 12, 2016, from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/es/diccionario/ingles/stream-of-consciousness