The Art of Literary Thieving: The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and Hamlet
Powered By Xquantum

The Art of Literary Thieving: The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, ...

Chapter 1:  The Catcher in the Rye
Read
image Next

Seymour then returns to his hotel room, where his wife, Muriel, is napping, and the story ends as follows:

He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. He cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple. (J. D. Salinger 1964, 18)

We find a clear example here of Salinger purposefully misleading his readers into thinking that Seymour is going to shoot his wife. “Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol” (18). Why might we assume that he was about to shoot her? Before this point, Muriel has been portrayed as one of the many women in this story who are concerned with only the trivialities of their existences. As Muriel waits for a phone call,

She read an article in a woman's pocket-size magazine, called “Sex Is Fun—or Hell.” She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand. (3)

During the phone call, we learn from Muriel's mother that Seymour is seriously considered to be mentally unstable by a psychiatrist who has talked with her father about Seymour's peculiar behavior.