What do the fish in the catcher in the rye symbolize?
The kid wants to know where all the ducks go. The taxi driver says how the hell should he know but the ducks get frozen in. Holden wants to know where the ducks go, who looks after them, does someone take them away in a truck, do they fly away and if so where. The ducks have wings, so that they can get above the pond of society, but what good is it, if you don’t know where to go (Holden sees himself as a duck). The fish are the people Holden sees/describes as phonies; they are frozen into that pond, into a routine that is a “great deadener”, as Beckett said, frozen into the phoniness of their lives.
