Semester Project: Sunny

Link to story: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m1ipjO2IkTYzIKFooeqUKd0ZXCZz1-bB9vztHafR_Mc/edit?usp=sharing

Author’s Note

I wanted to write about Sunny from Catcher in the Rye because she has so much potential to be so many things. In the actual book, Holden sees her as scared, young, and a little dumb. However, while I was writing this, she developed as a character with much more initiative and wisdom than could be expected from her colloquial dialect and “wheeny whiny voice.” In my story, Holden is the one who seems young, scared, and untested from her point of view.

A lot of inspiration for Sunny/Sarah’s character comes from Holden. She’s smart and a bit of a chronic liar as well, for her own survival. She’s very ambitious and world weary as well. I wanted to explore her relationship with Maurice as well as her potential relationships with the other girls she might work with (like my invented character Tillie). Tillie is an important character because she’s responsible for mentoring Sunny and caring about her deeply, even though we never meet her in person. Tillie also encourages Sunny to take responsibility for her life and her money, and Sunny looks up to her a lot, which also encourages her to follow her advice and take extra money from her clients.

I took her seeming love of movies further in this story and had her motivation be to become a Hollywood actress. That would explain why she tells Holden she spends much of her time “go[ing] to the show.” It would give a reason why she might not be from New York and why she turned to sex work to earn money. It also gave her a goal and a reason she would be taking extra money from her clients. This last was an invention by me, but one that would explain why she and Maurice show up back at Holden’s room to get more money after he’d already paid. I do think it makes sense that she would expect a large tip for her work that she doesn’t often get, and then be motivated to take money since she has so much to work for. She doesn’t see herself as a thief, since in her eyes this is money that already should belong to her.

To describe the movie Sunny saw earlier in the day, I researched movies that came out in 1949 to find one that she might have seen. I chose “The Heiress,” which had a glamorous lead actress that I thought Sunny would have looked up to. I think movies have a great impact up on her, which is a way she is contrasted with Holden. She brings this movie back a second time in this scene when she’s talking to Holden about him looking like a movie star and thinks to herself, “Not Montgomery Clift.”

There are also some small details I took from the text to put in the story, along with all the dialogue from the scenes in Holden’s room. I thought that the Lavender Room, a club Holden mentions in this hotel, the Edmont, would be important. He says there were a lot of sleazy types there and I thought it could work as a place where the girls could go to pick up clients themselves that wasn’t very far out of their way. In this way, he could have met Sunny earlier if she hadn’t been feeling tired that night. I used Maurice’s status as a worker in the hotel to give him the agency to let the girls stay in empty rooms. Since Holden sees Sunny as so young, I made her about his age, but gave her a fake ID so that she could reasonably be doing things like drinking in the Lavender Room without much hassle. I used the detail that Sunny dyes her hair blonde to show the impact Tillie’s help has had on her. I used all the clothing details Holden describes to tell what Sunny was wearing, and I used the room number Holden provides, 1222.

I also included a parallel balcony scene, because I thought Holden’s musings on the balcony were a good way to close out his chapter, and I wanted to mirror that with my story. Sunny also thinks briefly about what might happen if she were to jump off the balcony, and she insinuates that this is something she thinks about somewhat often. She doesn’t actually seem to consider it though, but is just curious.

I enjoyed writing this story, and exploring a very weird scene in Catcher in the Rye from another character’s perspective. I don’t think Sunny had enough time to prove herself in the book, but I could see that she had a distinct personality and goal that she’d like to show off.