Day and Night in the Catcher in the Rye

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Recommended: The catcher in the rye overview essay

The action of The Catcher in the Rye takes place between 15:00 on the Saturday previous to Christmas holidays 1949 and approximately the same time the next Monday. Holden Caulfield explains what happened to him during these forty-eight hours. The reader's impression when he/she finishes reading the novel is that most of it takes part during night-time. To confirm that impression I decided to establish the times of transition between day and night, situate these moments in the novel and count how many pages correspond to day and night.

To make the chronology of the events described it was necessary to establish the time of sunrise and sunset in New York City for the days during which the action develops. These times change approximately one minute from one day to the next in December, so we can apply without error the times for December 20th. On this day in New York, with a latitude of 400 N, dawn begins at 06:46 and the sunrise is at 07:17, while sunset is at 16:37 and twilight begins at 17:08, which gives us a period of darkness of fourteen hours, form 17:00 to 07:00 next day (all times refer to the Official Standard Time of the East Coast).

Now it is necessary to situate these moments of change from day to night in the novel. The events begin with Holden standing on Thomsen Hill Agertown, PA, overlooking a football match being played at Pencey. He has arrived from New York at 14:30. The train station is not too far from school -like he says at the beginning of chapter eight- and it is logical to think that he has gone to his room to leave his bag, so it must be around 15:00 or 15:30. He spends some time on the hill thinking and then goes to Mr. Spencer's house, where he would arrive around 16:00. The visit could last ar...

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Bloom, Harold. ed. Major Literary Characters: Holden Caufield. New York: Chelsea, 1990. (F. Lit. Inglesa: CA 1386)

Spark Notes: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/catcher/

Smoke Gets in your eyes: http://www.mmjp.or.jp/amlang.atc/audio/smoke.htm

The Catcher in the Rye Book index. http://www.geocities.com/exploring_citr/bookindex.htm#act

Dead Caulfields. Chronology: http://www.geocities.com/deadcaulfields/CatcherChronology.html

Observatorio de la Armada en San Fernando: http://www.roa.es/Efemerides/fenomenos.html

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