Post 1 - Plot

Question: Who is the protagonist of the story? What are the conflicts? Are they physical, intellectual, moral, or emotional? Is the main conflict between sharply differentiated good and evil, or is it more subtle and complex?

The protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger is Holden Caulfield, an angst adolescent. Throughout the novel, Holden is faced with conflict - with his peers, teachers, family and strangers. Some of this dissension is physical, as in the case of Sunny and Maurice, however, the majority of the strife is moral and emotion. The most evident and potent within the story is Holden’s interior moral debate between growing up into the masses of “phonies,” or ardently resisting the conformity in society. Throughout the novel, Holden takes a strong stance against the adult world, however, he tends to show great hypocrisy in his behavior. He condemns being fake, yet he consistently lies, and even enjoys it, as seen when he says, “Once I get started [lying], I can go for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. Hours” (Salinger, 58). It is these inconsistencies that add depth to the character of Holden, and makes his interior struggle far more believable.

The main conflict does take a powerful viewpoint on good and evil, but the outlook is biased by Holden’s personal values. In his mind, the pure, innocent children are good, and the corrupted, contrived adults are evil. This forms the idea of his personal utopia that he describes by saying, “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around - nobody big, I mean - except me . . . What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them” (Salinger, 173). It is here we are given a taste of a possible solution to Holden’s conflict, however, at the same time it presents even more complexities to the issue. 

Ultimately, the moral predicament in the The Catcher in the Rye presents a definitive stance on right versus wrong, but with far more complexities intertwined in a subtle manner.