3 - Holden's Museum Pieces: Narrator and Nominal Audience in The Catcher in the Rye

Summary

I should not talk about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.

–H. D. Thoreau, Walden

Who knows but on the lower frequencies I speak for you?

–Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish too?

–Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

REREAD over the years as I've grown older and had to confront my own and others' varying reactions to the text, The Catcher in the Rye seems an experience in both constancy and mutability. What Holden Caulfield says of the Eskimo exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is equally true of the unchanging printed exhibit of Salinger's text:

Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different that's all. … I mean you'd be different in some way – I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.

Certainly Salinger doesn't feel like explaining what he means. He simply – or, rather, complexly – presents an encased or, if you will, frozen narrative fragment that bears some sort of analogous relationship to the Eskimo: “He was sitting over a hole in this icy lake, and he was fishing through it.