Catcher In The Rye And The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

In extract one from chapter 12 in The Catcher in the Rye Holden takes another taxi ride from his hotel to a nightclub. He meets a cab driver, a man named Horwitz, and engages him in a conversation in which he reveals his anxiety towards society and his growing depression. Extract 2 from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is from chapter 16 and features Huck and Jim drifting further south on their raft to Cairo, whereupon Huck grows more concerned about the enormity and consequences of his actions. Escape is presented in both texts in remarkably similar ways: in Catcher in the Rye the emblematic nature of the ducks that Holden inquires about expose us to his inner conflict and separation from society, whereas in Huck Finn, Huck’s struggle between

Although Huck has escaped the Widow Douglas and her attempts at ‘sivilising’ him by this point in the novel, he is still subject to the expectations and demands set by his society. The men Huck meets on the ‘skiff’ at the end of this extract are, like all the other characters that Huck meets, caricatures of the southern way of life that Huck is escaping from. The conversation that follows is dominated solely by the two men, with Huck taking short turns through the form of ‘yes sir’ and ‘only one, sir’. This is incongruous with his earlier ‘conversation’ with his conscience in his internal monologue, where he takes comparatively long turns. Huck describes his conscience as saying ‘What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that you could see her nigger go’. Huck subverts society’s expectations in this chapter by allowing Jim to escape but in turn goes against all of the values taught by his society; the term ‘nigger’ is rooted in pre-abolition America but from the 21st century readers’ point of view it would be considered taboo, with Huck’s use of it accentuating to the reader that he is a product of his society. Later in the novel, Huck describes Jim as a ‘mighty good nigger’ – to many in 19th century America, it would be seen as impossible for a black person to be ‘good’. The eventual result of this is that he rejects conventional morality, instead choosing to do what his

In this extract we see Holden becoming concerned about ‘the ducks that swim around’ in the lagoon at central park. Perhaps JD Salinger intends the ducks, a recurring motif in the novel, to be symbolic of mortality because when the ducks ‘fly away by themselves’ they are no longer around – similar to how Holden fears that when he dies he will be forgotten by those around him in the same way that Allie and James Castle were. While Horwitz and others may find solace in romanticised logic – that ‘mother nature’ will take care of its own – Holden does not, instead seeing death not only as something physical but something mental and emotional as well. This scene shows escape from society in a different, more ‘mature’ way to Huck Finn: it could be said that, for Holden, the only way he can escape from society is through his own death (as shown in Chapter 14, when Holden says ‘What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window’) Contrastingly, it could be said that the ducks are also representative of innocence, which Holden covets and yearns to protect and that this in turn represents Holden’s desire to understand what happens to those who are forced by society to grow up. Holden’s questioning about whether ‘a truck… takes [the ducks] away’ or if ‘they fly away by themselves’ could be