Metaphorical thinking in our literary experiences of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”

Abstract This article explores how literary texts, in this case the novel “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, elicit metaphorical thinking as a major part of readers’ interpretive experiences. Our main argument is that metaphorical thinking does not arise only given our encounter with individual verbal metaphors, but emerges in various ways as part of our habitual forms of imaginative metaphorical understandings. Metaphorical thinking is closely linked to embodied simulation processes by which readers project themselves imaginatively into the lives of story characters. Embodied simulation processes capture readers’ rich phenomenological characteristics (e.g., immersion, absorption, transportation) of literary experience. Metaphorical thinking unfolds in hierarchical layers across different time spans during literary reading.