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Unreliable Narrator
Explanation and Analysis—Unreliable Holden:
Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, is a famously unreliable narrator. His partial and often skewed narration colors the entire novel with his perspective and his biases. For example, a notable marker of his unreliability is his delayed—and very casual—mention of his brother Allie's death. He initially withholds this detail from the reader, even though it would have provided useful context to explain a good deal of his otherwise strange behavior. When he does mention it, he quips: “He’s dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You’d have liked him.” This nonchalant revelation and others like it imply that Holden is trying to suppress or downplay the impact Allie's death has on him. It’s too hard to admit how important this event was, so he skirts around it. It’s easier to like and find Holden relatable as the novel goes on because the reader is able to sympathize with him when these hidden things catch the light.
Holden also often contradicts himself, sometimes at a sentence level and sometimes on a larger scale. For example, he tells the reader that he’s “quite illiterate, but [he] reads a lot.” He criticizes others for being “phony,” but he lies frequently, often making up new names and identities for himself. He also begins the novel by telling his audience that he doesn’t want to share his whole “goddam life story,” but then he does exactly that. His fluctuating feelings of depression and anxiety also distort his perceptions and the order of the events he narrates. They also seem to interfere with his memory and his perceptions in real time, as he describes feeling “so depressed [he] didn’t even think.” The salient fact that he seems to be recounting the story from the safety of a mental healthcare facility also complicates his reliability. A lot of the novel reads as though Holden is trying to understand the meaning behind these events himself—which, as it turns out, he definitely is.
Related Themes:
