An Interpretation Of The Catcher In The Rye With The Principle Of Binary Opposition

J.D. Salinger has long been acclaimed as one of the most celebrated men of letters in the United States after World WarⅡ. Much of Salinger's reputation rests largely on his novel The Catcher in the Rye, and he has won great praise and tremendous admiration among young intellectuals. In The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger shows penetrating insights into the living conditions and mental outlook of the adolescents in a transition period by encoding the narrative structure in a binary format. This thesis tries to decode the binary opposites in The Catcher in the Rye. To conceptualize this study, this thesis makes a brief survey of the rising and the ebbing of structuralism and reviews the narratologists'key ideas on binary oppositions as a theoretical framework.This thesis is written with the belief that it will provide a multi-dimensional analysis of Salinger's narrative art and the protagonist Holden Caulfield, thereby expanding the range of meaning that the reader can find in the works of this prominent American writer. Besides the binary opposition extradiegetic narrator vs. intradiegetic narrator from the perspective of narrative level, the binaries that the thesis mainly found to best express Holden Caulfield's dilemma are man vs. himself and man vs. society. All of the other binaries seem to fall under these headings.Protagonist Holden Caulfield is a cantankerous teenager who is headstrong, self-opinionated and disenchanted with the isolation he feels living in the phony modern world. Everyone goes through a rebellious stage called terrible teens. As a teenager, it's easy to identify with Holden and his internal struggles. The present thesis makes a tentative study of those two pairs of binaries in the following perspectives: binary opposition in narrative, in characterization and in theme, with the manifestations of variant binary opposites. As for the narrative structure in Catcher, the binary opposition Holden vs. himself is an axial wire running through the whole book. Its variant binary opposites Holden's loneliness and his need for isolation fully give proof of Holden's internal conflicts. In the perspective of characterization, the two variant binary pairs are Holden as an inner-directed personality in an other-directed society and Holden's innocent inner world and the"phony"outer world. Therefore, Holden is a character of contradiction. The last binary is concerned with one point: the vexation of growing up—Holden, stuck between fantasy and reality. In essence, Holden Caulfield is a good guy stuck in a bad world. He is trying to make the best of his life, though ultimately losing that battle. It is a testament to his innocence and decent spirit that Holden would place the safety and well-being of children as a goal in his lifetime. This serves to only reiterate the fact that Holden is a sympathetic character, a person of high moral values who is too weak to pick himself up from a difficult situation.Salinger's interest in binary opposition originates from his innate concern about what's deep down in humanity and how people carry on with life. Man is a social being. The conflict man vs. self intertwines with the conflict man vs. society. By finding these binary oppositions within the text and showing how these oppositions interrelate, the readers can then decode the text, thereby explaining its meaning.Recognizing such binaries can open up the ideas J. D. Salinger is trying to express. Look out for these oppositions as they can allow a deep understanding of what is happening in the text as well as alerting the reader to the"big picture"—what it is all about.