Living in a phony world: character figuration in J. D. Salinger's The catcher in the rye

Abstract

The Catcher in the Rye, a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger, highlights the construction of the character as the leading role of the narrative. The fictional character has provoked closer looks  on the part of the Literary Studies, mainly on Narrative Studies field, which analyses the fictional figure considering its ideological, social, and identity aspects. Therefore, in this article, I aim to discuss character figuration in the cited novel, focusing on the main character, Holden Caulfield, through the lens of his figuration dynamics. For the analysis, I consider the themes through which the constitutive material of the fictional figure is constituted, namely: his relation to time, childhood, innocence, and sexuality. The theoretical framework is shaped through authors such as Ian Watt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Zéraffa, E. M. Forster, Carlos Reis, and Maria da Glória Bordini.