Plot and stucutr in The Cather in the Rye
...’t. Another thing that gives the story a sense of balance is that Holden brings up the fencing equipment in the later chapters again, referring to how he left them on the train in the beginning of the story, again balancing the story beginning and end. There are also many reoccurring themes in this story, which run as a thread throughout all of the episodes linking the story together. Some of them include: phoniness and Holden’s dislike of it, childhood, innocence, depression, aloneness, all told in many different episodes. Every interaction Holden has with someone is an episode because, with the exception of a few people, every person he meets leaves the story almost as quickly as he entered. This lack of long term friends leads to the other reoccurring themes. Because no one stays with Holden throughout the story he has a constant feeling of aloneness, which conveys a sense of loneliness and depression. The use of misleading conclusions is evident in the story connected to the balance in the story. When he is talking to the psychoanalyst he says, “Ill just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run down and had to come out here to take it easy.”(Salinger, 1). He never tells us that he is “sick” and that he is talking to a psychoanalyst. This gives the reader a chance to make assumptions as to why Holden is there, but because the reader only finds this out at the end of the novel, any assumptions made could be wrong because of this misleading information. In the novel the plot is all the events of Holden’s story put together by the different forms of structure mentioned earlier. The plot in the story is basically Holden’s story in different episodes for each character and event that happens in the story. This helps the story move along, although the episodes don’t seem to connec...