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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
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, WaldenWho knows but on the lower frequencies I speak for you?
–Ralph Ellison, Invisible ManAnd what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish too?
–Herman Melville, Moby-DickREREAD 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.
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