In The Catcher In The Rye by: J.D. Salinger the perception of time plays a vital role in understanding the character of Holden Caulfield and his sudden change throughout the novel. At the beginning of the book, young Holden had found out that he has been kicked out of Pency (an expensive boarding school in Pennsylvania) and now has to reflect on his time that was not well spent. He failed all of his classes except for English and made enemies of everyone around him. We find out that the book is Holden reflecting on that weekend from a hospital bed in what we can assume is a psychiatric facility, here he realizes that he needs to learn from his mistakes and that the perceptions of him are not because the people around him are phony. These realizations …show more content…
The suspended time allows us to see inside his mind of him and not just learn what he thinks, but why he thinks the way he does, his thought processes in great detail. With an unreliable narrator like Holden it is tough to know what is happening around him that is actually happening the way he says it is or if it is something that he is exaggerating. Salinger also jumps around hours ahead and hours back throughout the story to allow him to emphasize how much confusion Holden has. When Holden was having an episode (more than likely a nervous breakdown) he was replaying memories in his head of his deceased brother Allie and he “...started sweating like a bastard--my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started doing something else. Every time I’d get to the end of a block I’d make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I’d say to him, ‘Allie, please don’t let me disapper’” (Salinger 108)... These flashbacks and fastforwards show how scrambled Holden’s mind is, it makes the reader think that the story is taking place over the span of a few weeks but instead it starts on a Thursday and ends on a Sunday morning. This inconsistency adds to the development of Holden as a character, he learns that being antisocial and