The Unreliable Narrator

What I have found most interesting about the novel so far is the affect of Holden’s unreliability. I have had many writing assignments to develop an unreliable narrator and not only do I always find them extremely difficult, I never see the point. I always felt that if the reader couldn’t trust the narrator, then they would stop reading

Holden lets us no from the beginning that he is a liar, even about trivial things. Since we know this, it makes it nearly impossible to trust anything he is saying about the outside world. His descriptions of people and places and past events become almost unimportant because I’m already aware that it could possibly be a lie. But this doesn’t make me want to stop reading, it just forces my to focus less on what is going on around him and more on what is going on inside of him.

For example, when he goes to the bar in his hotel and he meets the three women, he describes them all as ugly and says their company is a drag. The only good thing he had to say was that the Blonde was a good dancer. The image he portrays of them makes them seem like desperate old ladies at a bar trying to meet up with someone famous. This could be true, but it is also possible that the women were beautiful and fu but because they weren’t interested in him, he lied about who they were.

In this instance I found myself less concerned with the women and instead with what they represented to Holden. To him, they were an escape from his loneliness. If I trusted Holden’s descriptions, I would see these women as characters rather than as symbols. Because Holden lies, I see them more as symbols. In a way, this makes Holden the only character in the book because everyone else is just his opinion of them.

I think I’ll be able to explain this a bit better in class but what I’m trying to say is that Holden’s unreliability makes everything he says lose value and Holden becomes the center of focus. I’m excited to see how this shapes the novel in future chapters but so far it has really made me think about what Holden is going through and less about what he is doing.