Page 66 - Knighted_Issue2.0

Katie Gray

Ducks, Lagoons, and Phonies: An Ecocritical Analysis of The Catcher in the Rye

In J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, protagonist Holden Caulfield is a Caucasian,
upper middle class sixteen year-old who is expelled from boarding school for poor academic
performance. The entire novel is narrated by Holden, who describes his weekend of wandering
through New York City to temporarily avoid admitting his failures to his parents. Though
Holden interacts with a multitude of people, he feels alienated and unhappy. He dances in
nightclubs, frequents the movie theater, and goes on dates, but finds no happiness in New York,
a hyper-urbanized city that Holden believes is full of "phonies." Through his isolation and
depression, Holden maintains an ecological consciousness as he expresses a protective concern
for animals and a desire to escape the city for a more natural and simplistic lifestyle. The Catcher
in the Rye is an ecocritical text, as the novel critiques urbanization and commercialism and
argues a need for humanity to find a more healthy and balanced relationship with nature.

Ecocritical scholar Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as, simply, "the study ofthe
relationship between literature and the physical environment" (xviii). While ecocriticism covers
a variety of subjects and interests, "most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the
troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the
consequences of human actions are damaging the planet's basic life support systems" (Glotfelty
xx). Critic K.N. Shoba also notes that "ecocriticism is not just a means of analyzing nature in
literature; it implies a move toward a more biocentric world-view, an extension of ethics, a