The Museum: Frozen and Infinite Scenes

When we go to a museum, we find ourselves in a place where time does not pass by, in fact, it is a place in which time is preciously preserved, and scenarios hardly ever vary, a place in which we can lose ourselves and we can get trapped in endless time. There is no movement, no changes, no track of time, and that caused a major impact in The Catcher in The Rye’s protagonist Holden, who felt the desire of staying in a specific moment of life he treasured the most; youth. But isn’t it ironic that a place that explains and exposes evolution can hold Holden to the fear of change?

Growing up and changing is inevitable, but that is something hard to face for many people who are scared of dealing with the fact that life is a process, a series of stages and adjustments that nobody can escape.  For Holden, the fear of facing his coming up transition to adulthood, and the modifications and uncertainties that this process brought with it, made him want to stay in the good old days of adolescence, in which he was certainly comfortable.

When Holden mentions The Museum of Natural History we can clearly tell that it is one of the moments in which he expresses his concern and reluctance towards changing.

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole” 

In this quote, it is obvious that Holden is captivated by the immobility and stillness of the things at the museum, and the way in which no matter how many time you go to that place, the scenes are always the same and there is no fluctuation nor movement in any scene or object, no action at all.

What he appreciates the most about going to the museum is that it is one of the only things in his life that did not change, the place looked always the same and that represents what he yearns the most, the longevity of a moment, the freeze scenario that would be eternally treasured as something steady in his life, the one thing that would remain as he remembers, because unlike things at the museum, everything else changes and evolves.

“I kept thinking about old Phoebe going to that museum on Saturdays the way I used to. I thought how she’d see the same stuff I used to see, and how she’d be different every time she saw it”

Holden thinks about the fact that everything eventually changes and he thinks about posterity, when Phoebe is older and eventually she would visit the museum, and the only things that would remain the same are the exhibits at the museum, but neither him nor Phoebe would be the same anymore, they will be different, and there is no way of changing that. At the end the only aspect that does not change is the fact that people and circumstances change.

In the moment in which Holden thinks about how phoebe will be different every time she visits the museum, he is already aware of the fact that there is an inevitability in his life, the one that causes him nostalgia, the fact that things will never be the same, that people change, age, and move on from one stage in life to the next one.

It was important analyze the symbolic use of The Museum of Natural History, because it is one of the symbols used in the book that makes us comprehend the fear Holden has toward the future, but at the same time it is a place that makes him realize the inevitability.

We can tell that a museum is in fact a place in which changes are exposed; the evolution of men and Earth through time in frozen scenes; however, they still show growth, progress and transformation. This is an interesting point, because as we read the book we notice that Holden assumes the inevitable with the help of ideas that came up when he thought about things like what happened when he visited the museum, but he never realizes that the museum itself represents changes, and one of its objectives is for people to see and understand progress and evolution.

References

• Salinger, J. D., Mitchell, E. M., & Jacobi, L. (1951). The Catcher in the Rye.