Literary Analysis Of The Catcher In The Rye

The plot of The Catcher in the Rye concerns the three-day odyssey of Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from Pencey Prep for bad grades and general irresponsibility. At the beginning of the story, Holden is in a sanitarium in California, recovering from a mental breakdown. He says that he is not going to tell his life-story but just the story of “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.5) . In the final chapter he speculates about what he is going to do when he is released and reflects on “all this stuff I just finished telling you about. … If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it”(p.192). Between these important framing limits, the story proper is contained. Although Salinger’s admirers have responded in a variety of ways to The Catcher in the Rye, idealizing Holden in particular, they play down the seriousness of his remaining unconscious about himself, creating fantasies about the world and swaying from one choice to another. It reads like …show more content…
Consequently, he changes his mind very often, swaying from one choice to another, which is the characteristic of Holden—ambivalence. And it is easy to demonstrate he is so since his ambivalence is toward so many people and things. He is contemptuous of Pencey but is careful to emphasize that it has a “very good academic rating”(p.4). He claims to loathe the perverts he sees through his hotel window, but makes a special effort to watch them and even admits that “that kind of junk is fascinating” and that he wouldn’t mind doing it himself “if the opportunity came up”(p.62). He wants to see people—Mr. Antolini, Mr. Spencer, and Carl Luce for example—but do not like then when they are in his presence. Obviously, then, Holden is ambivalent, and ambivalence is a certain indication of his mental