Red Hunting Cap

Holden's red hunting cap is another small artifact of symbolic meaning. He bought it for one dollar in New York on the Saturday morning when he lost the fencing equipment. The cap is practical at times but is foolish-looking, with its extra-long bill and earflaps. It represents Holden's delightful attraction to unusual qualities, in objects as well as people, that others might miss. He realizes that the hat is unfashionable and occasionally is careful about who sees it, but he loves it anyway. He likes to wear it with the bill pointing to the back, as a baseball catcher might. For Holden, it is a reading cap as much as a protection against the cold. Because this is a hunting cap, we might speculate on what it is that Holden is hunting.

!Holden's Red Hunting Hat

[Ackley] took another look at my hat... “Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That's a deer shooting hat.”
“Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.”

This brief passage occurs in Chapter 3, after Holden has returned to his dorm room and is being pestered by Ackley. Of all the places in the novel where Holden discusses his hat, the most famous and recognizable symbol in the book, this is probably the most enlightening. It is obvious from the start that Holden uses the hat as a mark of individuality and independence. Here, we see how deeply his desire for independence is connected to his feeling of alienation, to the bitterness he has for the rest of the world. Of course, Holden will not really shoot people in this hat, but it remains a symbol of his scorn for convention. Holden nevertheless does “shoot people” in his own way: when he is in this cynical frame of mind, he expends all of his mental energy denigrating the people around him. He desires independence because he feels that the world is an inhospitable, ugly place that, he feels, deserves only contempt.

The red hunting hat is one of the most recognizable symbols from twentieth-century American literature. It is inseparable from our image of Holden, with good reason: it is a symbol of his uniqueness and individuality. The hat is unusual, and it shows that Holden desires to be different from everyone around him. At the same time, he is very self-conscious about the hat—he always mentions when he is wearing it, and he often doesn't wear it if he is going to be around people he knows. The presence of the hat, therefore, mirrors the central conflict in the book: Holden's need for isolation versus his need for companionship.

It is worth noting that the hat's color, red, is the same as that of Allie's and Phoebe's hair. Perhaps Holden associates it with the innocence and purity he believes these characters represent and wears it as a way to connect to them. He never explicitly comments on the hat's significance other than to mention its unusual appearance.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11