The Arts in NYC

1

Breakfast in the Rye

The story goes like this: A person wanders about the overflowing streets of New York City, lost in the melting pot and urban grandeur, hopelessly searching for his or her place in society. Sounds familiar? Well to me it did, more than once.

Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's," written in 1958 is remarkably analogous to J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," written seven years earlier in 1951. The entire time I read Capote's novella, Salinger's novel constantly sat in the back of my mind.

In "Breakfast at Tiffany's," Holly Golightly is the main character who was raised in a foster home at a young age shortly after the death of her parents. In her preteen years she decides to run away because she wanted to find people who could comfort her. Later she ends up in an apartment in NYC, where she rarely stays put. Once in a while she would return to her place with a different man, looking for the person to make her feel secure, but always failing to find that Mr. Perfect. She even ends up in the narrator’s room at one point, looking to discover who he was. She also goes back and forth to visit Sally Tomato, a convicted felon, in the Sing Sing prison every week, where she has soothing conversations with this darling old stranger who symbolizes one retreat in her chaotic world. Yet in the end, she ends up leaving NYC for Rio, continuing on her perpetual search for her place in the world.

Similarly, in “The Catcher and the Rye,” the protagonist Holden Caulfield is brought up by a wealthy family who, in his perspective, doesn’t understand him. They send him off to boarding school, where he is surrounded by “phonies” for roommates with unsightly appearances—symbolizing his need to conjure up excuses for feeling as if he was unwelcome. In time, he drops out from school and without parental notice and decides to get lost in NYC for a weekend. There, he travels around from one place to another in search of a comfort zone. He hops from one hotel to the next bar, meeting “phonies” everywhere he goes until he ends up at Central Park, looking for ducks in the winter (remind you of Holly abandoning her cat at Central Park?). At one point, he visits his old professor, who makes him feel even more uncomfortable after making homosexual gestures, causing Holden to flee and dash home to find his sister. There he feels he is at home, but even this feeling is ephemeral, as he decides to run off again, finally ending up in a mental institution, unable to find where he belonged in society.

The two novels are strikingly similar in mood and scenery. I imagined both stories taking place in the same setting, as if one story was a sequel to the other. Perhaps Salinger’s groundbreaking novel inspired Capote to write a similar piece, or maybe it was all just a coincidence. Regardless, this fact does not make Capote any more of an imposter than Salinger. Both writers helped illustrate the typical hectic lifestyles of us New Yorkers, who are constantly on the run and have no idea where we belong in society. Their descriptive tales shed light on general flawed perspectives on the concept of a perfect life. There is no “perfect life.” I learned that your life is what you make of it, and that you shouldn’t run away when everything doesn’t go the way you planned. We should just take what we have, make the best of it, and let time tell the rest of the story.

-Michael Cheng