The Cather in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye

The closing chapter of the novel identifies the setting of the narration as a place - most likely a clinic or hospital -where the narrator, Holden Caulfield, is recovering from a mental breakdown. Leading up to this chapter, i.e. from Chapter 1 to 25, is the story of how he comes to be in this place.

It is also in the last chapter that we can identify the "you" Holden has been addressing throughout as someone who is not directly connected to the events of the narrative. Most likely, the "you" is the reader to whom the narrative is addressed. All the same, she/he is an ideal listener for Holden.

Very early in the first chapter, Holden sets the parameters (and terms) of his narrative in the following:

. . . I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. (1994: 1)

Granted, a story about a few days in the life of a fictional character can hardly be called an autobiography. So what is it? It is important to keep in mind that what we call it will ultimately determine, or at the very least shape, how we read it.

In The Art of Fiction (1992), David Lodge calls The Catcher in the Rye "skaz," because "we don't so much read it as listen to it, as to a talkative stranger encountered in a pub or railway carriage" ("Teenage Skaz," 1992: 18). "Skaz is a . . . Russian word . . . used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word" (1992: 18).

The choice of this form by Salinger is purposeful: its most immediate consequence is that, in a very subtle way, the narrator, Holden, gains the readers' confidence through the impression that he creates of his story as an unrehearsed appraisal of his society's obsession with meaningless materialism, which has made him an outsider from it.

Arial (Body)

The Catcher in the Rye (1945-1946;1951)

"Teenage Skaz"

...