Symbolism In Catcher In The Rye

Have you ever lost someone or felt utterly useless and helpless? Have you ever gone through a life-changing experience to reach a goal at the end. Well in J.D Salinger's Novel The Catcher in the Rye there there's a character named Holden that goes through these very things as in the big city of New York. There were many things that pushed him through this troubling experience and many symbols that helped us understand his life and past. There are three main symbols that hold meaning to the novel's overall theme which are the hunting hat, the Central Park ducks, and the Museum of Natural history. These three things all tie together how Holden can't mature and wants to hold on to his childhood as long as possible. We see from Holden that you

We see that Holden buys the hat in New York for only a dollar and we also see that whenever he wears the hat his childish side shows more than normal. For example, in the novel he says ¨Ï put on this hat that id bought in New York that morning. It was this red hunting hat with one of those very long peaks. I saw it in the window of some sports store when we got out of the subway, just after I'd noticed that id lost all the goddamn foils.¨ This was a very stupid thing for him to do as he lost track of school equipment for a lousy old hunting hat. Later when Holden is checking into a hotel he wants to stay at he says “We got to the Edmont Hotel, and I checked in. I’d put on my red hunting cap when I was in the cab, just for the hell of it, but I took it off before I checked in. I didn’t want to look like a screwball or something. Which is really ironic.” Holden even says in this chapter that he didn't want to look like a screwball in the hotel. He wants to look more mature and grown up so he takes the hat off and walks right

The Museum is a symbol of Holden's childhood again and how he doesn't want to grow up and hold onto his past. The museum reappears many times throughout the course of the book as a happy place for Holden cause he and his sister share happy memories together there. In the middle of the book Holden is revisiting his childhood and remembering his past times at the museum, he tells us “I get very happy when I think about it. Even now. I remember after we looked at all the Indian stuff, usually we went to see some movie in this big auditorium. . . .” This shows us that this was a happy place for him and maybe even a coping mechanism for him now on trying to escape his reality and again cling to his past. Holden also states “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket.” This quote is a clear example of how Holden hates change and doesn't want to move