Dan Hawley's Research Report

From English 194 Wiki

The Danger Beyond the Rye

Abstract

This essay is meant to be an argument for an open ending for our team project, Beyond the Rye. The argument would be that to allow the gamer to make poor choices and fall off the horse is essential for an accurate depiction of what J.D. Salinger intended with his work “Catcher in the Rye”.

Description

The novel “Catcher in the Rye” is the story of Holden Caulfield, a teenager who gets expelled from school and wanders the city of New York for a few days. In a very important moment, in fact, in the turning point of the novel, Holden is watching Phoebe on the carousel. She is riding around and reaching up for the gold ring. As Holden describes it, she is damn near falling off her horse trying to do it, too. It is at this point that Holden realizes that you cannot tell a kid not to reach for the gold ring, that you should never teach them to not reach for the gold ring. This is in contrast to his pre-existing notion that he would like to become a catcher in the rye. “Thus, on a symbolic level, the reader gets to know that Holden has realized that his dream is unrealistic: you/he cannot keep children from growing up and making their own (negative) experiences,” (Internal Aspects, 18).

Evaluation of Opportunities/Limitations for Team Project

What this point of information could mean for the team project is that the reader should have the choice to fall off the horse. We are recreating an extremely volatile universe in which the gamer is in a string of potentially dangerous situations. As Holden, our gamer is being hassled for an extra five dollars by Sonny and Maurice in his hotel room, and he refuses to give it up. He is drunk underage in a club. He is depressed and wandering the streets of New York and Central Park, alone in the middle of the night. There are a lot of potential moments of disaster for Holden in the novel “Catcher in the Rye” where one wrong step or turn of phrase could wind up getting Holden arrested, mugged, or even stabbed or killed. He nearly falls off the horse quite a few times in this set of chapters.

For example, in the scene with Maurice, Holden falling off the horse would NOT be Holden stabbing the pimp, but rather giving him the money. For Holden, that would be falling off the horse because it would make him a phony. I think that fighting back against Maurice would be an example of Holden standing up for what he believes in, and would actually be an example of Holden grabbing the gold ring and not falling off the horse.

The same can be done with whether or not Holden goes through with sex with Sonny, or if he calls Jane, or with many of the other choices that Holden makes.

For this project, the goal should be to find all of these moments within our set list of chapters and identify them. Then give the gamer the opportunity to take the path that Holden selects, or a path in which he falls off the horse in one way or the other. Sometimes Holden makes the wrong choice, other times he makes the right choice, but for the most part, the choices he makes are not entirely black and white.

I don’t believe that it is necessarily our job to decide whether the choices are right or wrong, but to present the gamer with plausible and realistic set of scenarios of cause and effect that would pan out for Holden if he were to make a different set of choices.

In doing this, we cannot allow for only one ending. If our gamer follows all the choices that Holden makes in the book, the gamer should get the book ending. But what if they don’t? What if Holden stabs Maurice? What if he gives up his money willingly? What if he gets too drunk and gets arrested in the club? If these things happen, Holden will not be the same person that he is in the end of Catcher in the Rye. He will be fundamentally changed. Not to mention, he’d be in a different place physically and emotionally. I believe that an attempt to get him back to one place would be forced.

Also, around this point in the novel, between chapters 11 and 17, Holden begins to split with his environment. The focus now is no longer on his interaction with his familiar surroundings, but rather their absence. We begin to become aware of a “great fall” that seems to be awaiting Holden, at around this time in the book, and I believe that this potential danger is what drives these chapters. That sense of danger should not only be looming here in our game, but also entirely possible, as it is for Holden. If there are no negative effects for dangerous actions, then where is the danger in Holden or the gamer doing them in the first place?