In the Amazon, as Esther lies in bed recovering from food poisoning, she picks up a magazine story which revolves around a fig tree. It’s a tale where a Jewish man and a nun meet under a tree, touching hands as they watch a bird hatch. When their relationship ends, and Esther comes to the end of the story, Esther draws a similarity between her relationship with Buddy Willard and the two characters of the story: “We had met together under our own imaginary fig-tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our separate ways.”(Plath 55) However, her version is already corrupted: the magazine story depicted new life emerging gently, whereas Buddy showed Esther a clinical and traumatic childbirth. In a sense, her “fig tree” was poisoned from the beginning. A couple of pages later into the story, as Esther sits in the UN building surrounded by people she perceives as genuinely talented, the fig tr...
Throughout the story, Holden constantly mentions his “red hunting hat”. Something that I noticed consistently mentions his hat when nervous, pulling the peak over his eyes when asking Stradlater about Jane or putting it on after leaving Pencey in tears, and I think that his interactions with his hat reveal a lot about him. Part of what I think is interesting about this hat is how Holden is hyper aware of how “corny” it looks. He admits that it's “very corny, I'll admit, but I liked it that way. I looked good in it that way”, (Salinger 10) which symbolizes his persona of being straying from society. However, he often takes it off when he’s around people he actually wants to impress or fit in with, like when entering the hotel or when he’s trying to look "mature" at a bar. He hates "phoniness”, but he dislikes the judgment that comes with being different. By wearing a "corny" hat that he likes but then hiding it to fit in, Holden throughout the book is st...