The Catcher in the Rye

Holden has just purchased a red hunting hat, which is not a typical or fashionable choice for an upper-class teenager like Holden. As he moves through the events of the novel, the hat comes to represent Holden’s attempt to assert his individuality, and he often puts it on or fidgets with it in moments when he is self-conscious. At the end of the novel, he gives it to Phoebe, who throws it at him when she is angry and then later takes it from his pocket to put it on him, symbolically permitting him to be himself.

Any time Holden is in a taxi, the fate of the ducks in the Central Park lagoon enters his mind, often to the consternation of the driver. For Holden, what happens to the ducks in winter is a matter of great importance, and he seems to be the only one who cares where they go or if they’re safe, which can be read as an embodiment of the ways that Holden is too sensitive for his environment. It can also be read as a representation of Holden’s concerns about what he should do when he feels he doesn’t belong, as he contemplates his own migration away from New York’s upper-crust society.

The museum supports the motif that Holden is afraid of change. As a result of his grief and possible PTSD over Allie’s death, Holden wishes everything could stay the same: children would never grow up, and he could continue being in limbo between adulthood and childhood. The museum, however, never changes: “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. […] The only thing that would be different would be you” (158).

Holden makes a snowball, but he can’t bring himself to throw it, as everything looks so “nice and white.” Instead, he takes it with him onto the bus, where the driver makes him throw it out. The snowball represents uncontaminated purity and childlike innocence. Just as Holden tries to cling to his childishness throughout the novel, he cannot seem to cast the snowball away and interrupt the perfection of the snow-covered world. The bus driver here represents the world itself, forcefully corrupting Holden’s need for childlike innocence.

Holden chooses to write about Allie’s baseball mitt when he agrees to do Stradlater’s homework; the mitt is covered in Allie’s favorite poems, and for Holden, the mitt is both a symbol of Allie’s innate goodness and the loss that Holden is still processing. Holden is caught between Allie (whom he views as eternally innocent) and D. B. (whom he sees as the jaded older brother who has made it safely into adulthood). The baseball mitt is a physical manifestation of Allie’s innocence, which even comes up as Holden remembers a moment between D.B and Allie in which D. B. brings an adult veteran’s perspective to the poems Allie has copied onto the glove. While Holden respects and even understands D. B.’s perspective, it’s Allie he longs to identify with.

Holden sees the words “fuck you” written on the steps outside of Phoebe’s school, and he wipes them away. He finds the same words scratched onto the building, and he decides that he can’t get rid of all the “fuck yous” in the world. The graffiti represents the adult world, which Holden sees as sullying the innocence of children. Just as he does at the end of the novel when he allows the children to fall on the carousel, Holden accepts that he can’t keep the world from affecting children.

Holden uses several slang terms that are typical for teenagers in the early 1950s, but this one, which usually means that something is hilarious, bears particular mention. Holden often uses this term to describe behaviors that he finds depressing or disappointing about the world, so his glib choice of words covers the deeper, more profound pain he feels by being alienated from those around him. The term takes on the weight of Holden’s sadness, particularly in the light of his suicidal ideation: he feels it’s the world around him that’s the problem, and his bitter sense of humor is a defense mechanism. It’s only when he’s with Phoebe that the term becomes genuine, as he finds actual pleasure in her company.