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The Catcher In The Rye Literary Analysis

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The Catcher in the Rye Literary Analysis Essay In the novel The Catcher in the Rye Salinger the author uses lots of symbols to express who Holden is and how he develops throughout the novel. Salinger gives Holden some symbolic feelings towards some things and places to express a different side of Holden. Holden’s baseball mitten acts as a memory of his dead brother Allie. He wears a red hunting hat to express alienation to the real adult world. The duck pond expresses Holden’s other side from his usual depressed and grumpy side. Through the use of these symbols Salinger further explains the theme and her own message to the reader of protecting children from losing their innocence when they grow up from being children to adults. Holden keeps a baseball mitt covered in poems his dead brother Allie wrote on there. He keeps it with him at all times and does not even show it to anyone except at very rare occasions as it means so much to Holden. The poems on the Baseball mitt express who Allie was and how unique he was to be he own kind. Holden respects Allie so much as Allie …show more content…

Whenever Holden feels depressed he usually puts on this hat to block all the society around him from affecting his depression. "I took my old hunting hat out and put it on. I knew I wouldn 't meet anybody that knew me". This quote shows how Holden wants to be unique and not a phony like others. He also realises that his family would recognise him if they saw someone with a red hunting hat as most people do not wear hunting hats when walking in a big city like New York. This shows how Holden is still trying to keep a hold of his inncence and not just let everything go and turn into a normal adult. He does this as he does not like change as he does not want to grow up and be an adult. This relates to the real world as people might get scared or depressed once put into the complex world of the

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In this excerpt from the beginning of the novel called The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, the main character, Holden Caulfield speaks to his psychologist about his deceased younger brother. Salinger includes this quote from Holden in order to offer the reader some understanding of his actions and attitude throughout the book, and it also enforces the thought that Holden is a character struggling with teen grief, misunderstood by his parents and the peers around him. In this quote, he seems to be lost in thought of the detail of his younger brother's baseball mitt, even remembering the "green ink" (Salinger) that was used on it. Because of this, readers can infer that Holden has spent much time with this mitt and that such an object has a great amount of sentimental value to him because it was a possession of a person that he cared greatly about. However, despite his pain, Holden does not allow himself to process his grief properly; he instead puts up a sort of facade of passiveness towards the death of younger brother.

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