Ten Literary Devices

Simile
“Anyway, it was December and all, and it was cold as a witch’s teat”
(p.4)

Metaphor
“Life is a game that one plays according to the rules”
(p. 8)

Hyperbole
“All you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she’ll hear you"
(p. 158)

Consonance
“I can read that kind of stuff...all day and all night long. Kid’s notebooks kill me”
(p. 161)

Situational irony
"Almost everytime somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad"
(p. 52)
-Receiving gifts makes most people happy. For Holden, however, he hates how his grandmother gives him gifts because he usually throws them away afterwards. Later in the story, Holden gets Phoebe a broken record as a present. Phoebe nontheless keeps the pieces, but later realizes that Holden had gone shopping before school was over. Thus, she concluded that he had been kicked out of school and starts to discipline her older brother. Holden's intentions of bringing Phoebe a gift turned into his sister threatening to tell their parents about the expulsion.

Symbolism
“My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way”
(p. 212)

Alliteration
"I'm not too tough...if you want to know the truth"
(p. 46)

Allusion
"He's carrying this copy of Oliver Twist and so's she"
(p. 138)

Onomatopoeia
"He's the best drummer I ever saw. He only gets a chance to bang them a couple of times during a whole piece"
(p. 138)

Verbal Irony
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one”
(p. 188)
-Holden, according to this description, is an immature man. Fearing corruption in teenagers' lives, he wants to die nobly to catch 'people falling off cliffs'. In effect, he is no longer part of the teenage norm. However, in the process, Holden quits school since he considers most of his friends childish. The sacrifice of not completing school to ideally save people is, according to the quote, the mark of an immature man and thus discouraged. Normally, though, people are considered heroes by fighting for what they believe in. In this case, Holden is criticized for wanting to save others.