Blog 2: Chapter 15-16

“The best thing, thought, in the museum was that everything stayed right where it was. Nobody’d moved. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finishing catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deer’s would still be drinking out of the water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty skinny legs… Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different is you” (Salinger 135).

This vignette from Catcher in the Rye shows a very powerful insight that Holden has. In this vignette Holden says that every time that he goes to the museum that nothing is different about it, except for himself. This is a powerful idea, it shows that people will change sometimes. They change while the things around them do not change. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. This scene is added to overall by the hyperbole, “You could go there a hundred thousand times” (Salinger 135), this hyperbole makes it seem like somethings will never change, like in a museum. But you still will be different each and every day.