123 School Work

Catcher In The Rye

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  I will be examining how Salinger creates a character whose narration is unreliable owing to Holden's innocence and naivet
       'The Catcher in the Rye' is set in the early 1950's and is based on the events of a 16 year-old prep school student, called Holden Caulfield, who has dropped out of school a couple of weeks before Christmas. Several days before he's expected home for the Christmas holidays, he abandons his school early to spend time on his own in New York City, where he lives.
       Holden Caulfield, the protagonist, is at an awkward age and is finding it difficult to establish the link between childhood and adulthood and this is a key ingredient to the story itself. An example of not being able to handle certain responsibilities is the incident where Holden forgets the foils on the subway train when taking the school fencing team to a match against another local school. This particular story appears more than once in the novel and in each Holden tells it in a different way. In the first instance Holden tell this story to the reader,
  
  "It wasn't all my fault. I had to keep getting up to look at this map, so we'd now when to get off"
  
  However, when another character in the book, Robert Ackley asks how the fencing team got on Holden tells the story in a different version from what he said to the reader,
  
  "We got on the wrong subway. I had to keep getting up to look at a goddam map on the wall"
  
  This shows us that Holden is an unreliable narrator, which makes the reader curious about other parts of the story that he has mentioned to them, for instance, the fact that he calls many of the people in his school and previous schools "phonies". It could be perceived that Holden is just lying to us about his forgetfulness of leaving the foils on the train, but from a different point of view it could be that he just hasn't understood what he has done and the trouble it has caused.
       The reader puts a certain amount of trust in the narrator when reading a story because they help us to witness the story as a whole but in this case with 'The Catcher in the Rye', we only have one view point and that is of Holden's, so we can only believe that these certain people whom he calls "phonies" are not very nice people because we don't have the ability to work out for ourselves that Holden is lying to us or not...