AngloAmerican Literature

The Social Narrative in "The Catcher in the Rye"

In this respect there is a political content to Holden’s view but never made explicit. The social narrative in which Holden is emerged This is the culture that surrounds Holden. This picture portrays the white bourgeois heteronormative family: 2 kids (a girl and a boy), the father/husband driving, everybody is smiling, happy (the happiness of the dominant model of social subjects), also because they have a nice car.

In the final phase of his journey, Holden reconnects with his little sister Phoebe at their parents’ home at first. After a short fight located at Mr. Antolini’s home in Sutton Place, which is a different location from the Central Park area, where the final stage of the novel is located and where he visits his former professor of whom he is fond, Holden sees again his little sister and the very conclusion of the novel sees Holden and Phoebe together at the Central Park Zoo, where Phoebe goes on a carousel.

Starting from the conversation that Holden has with Phoebe in...

they are much more sincere, authentic and to be trusted. Holden himself feels well at ease with her, whom he loves tremendously and with whom he seems capable of saying things about himself that are really true, so he opens up and connects with her in a way that was never possible before. We could say that Holden has a sort of veneration of his sister Phoebe (she even corrects Holden's spelling, so she seems somehow to be positioned in a condition of superiority with respect to Holden → ex. When Holden mentions this fantasy of the "Catcher in the Rye", she remembers that the expression was taken from the lines of a poem by Robert Burns, so she outsmarts her older brother and in her presence/during the conversation with her he feels somehow alert and respectful towards her.). We could say that she plays the role of the Superego in the relationship with Holden, in the sense that the Superego is the dimension of one's conscience that has to deal with rules, regulations,

Prohibitions and refers to the internalised figures of authority that everybody holds within him/herself, so it is that kind of authority that says to your own self what to do and what to avoid, setting the moral rules. In a way Phoebe (especially during the conversation in her room) plays the role of the internalized authority that in fact Holden lacks, because he does not recognize authority easily in adults, he rather recognizes authority in a small child like Phoebe, who seems to be much more reliable. She is a Superego figure not only because she corrects him, but also because she keeps reminding him that their father is going to kill Holden when he finds out about his being dropped out again from college and about his flight. This constant reminder "He will kill you" functions as a sort of Supergodic figure, that reminds Holden of the existence of this superior authority of adults through the incarnation, interiorization of authority by means of the 10-year-old little girl.

The only one that Holden is likely to listen to. It is to Phoebe that Holden reveals the fantasy that has been playing in his mind for a long time; this fantasy is of extreme importance in the novel because it helps explain the title "The Catcher in the Rye", which is otherwise pretty hard to make sense of. The catcher and the rye seem to be two very unrelated concepts: somebody who catches; the rye is a kind of cereal that grows in fields. The protagonist explains these two elements through a dream that he has been having for some time to his sister. (He had also already heard a song of a similar line to "If a body catch a body" sung by a young boy in a street casually and that made him happy immediately, apparently for no reason). Chapter 22: "I thought it was 'If a body catch a body'," I said. "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, Imean--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." Old Phoebe didn't say anything for a long time. Then, when she said something, all she said was, "Daddy's going to kill you."

This piece of conversation happens during an exchange in which Phoebe is somehow contexting her brother and she is urging him to say what he does like, what would he like to become and not just what he does not like, since this continuous negation, negative attitude on the part of Holen seems to Phoebe much steril, an unproductive attitude.

That is leading Holdennowhere. The answer on Holden's part is the fantasy which focuses upon a field of rye (segale) where thousands small children are playing (dream-like scenario) and there is just only one "grown up" figure, which is Holden himself, who is watching them and who performs a specific function in this scene: he catches the children before the risk falling off a cliff nearby. He ends the revelation about himself by saying "I know it is crazy" and this is something that Holden continues to say over and over: as the novel draws to its conclusion, Holden seems to be more aware of the fact that he is going psychologically worse. Holden's

What kind of meaning can we attach to the way in which the deepest content of imagination is revealed to us? Certainly there is some deep connection between the fantasy and Holden's own experience of suffering from the death of his brother and in general a deep connection with Holden's identification.

With children suffering, being hurt; it seems like he wants to guide them in order to avoid trauma and suffering on the way to adulthood. There is the theme of identification but also something else that goes beyond Holden's experience and somehow gains a large symbolic dimension: the elements of the fantasy evoke different themes that recur in the novel: children are symbolic of innocence, purity, there is also a question of taking one's responsibility towards other at play here, even if there is no a final statement on it. What seems to be really at work here though is an attempt, a desire to take responsibility for others, because he tries to do something for the children, preventing them from falling off, on Holden's part. At the same time Holden seems to have misjudged the true sense of a responsibility towards children, but in order to understand it, it is necessary to see in more detail the

children were protected from growing up and entering the world of experience. Here we can interpret it as the fear of growing up, moving towards adulthood even if he does not want to,