J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, introduced to me by my dad, is one of my favorite books of all time. When we apply Kurt Vonnegut’s theory of the Shape of Stories, this book has a particularly peculiar shape. I don’t know how many people have read Catcher, but if you have, you probably know that it doesn’t have much of a plot, rather it is the narrator’s stream of conscious. So, to depict this steady stream of consciousness, I drew a picture of what I think the shape of the story would look like:

If you look closely, you can see that the red dotted line has no variation along the x-axis (the “B & E axis” as Vonnegut calls it).  When you read Catcher, sure, Holden’s emotions change, but his underlying fortune does not–he is still being kicked out of his private school and he still does not have any plans for what is going to do by the end of the novel. He alludes to moving away, but is persuaded by his sister not to go.

Not a lot of stories have a shape like this one or not a lot did (it was definitely the first of its kind) which is what makes it one of my favorite novels.

Yeahhhh buddyyyy.