What are the themes of The Catcher in the Rye?

"Where do the ducks go when the pond freezes over?"

Question: What are the themes of The Catcher in the Rye?
Position1 of 5›: The Catcher in the Rye is about mental illness
Argument1 of 2›: "Where do the ducks go when the pond freezes over?"

Holden Caulfield frequently asks this question to avoid his problems.

The argument

At times when Holden Caulfield feels exceptionally sad, he mentions the ducks in Central Park. Multiple times throughout the novel he expresses concern about where they go in the winter, since the pond will be frozen. The question recurs at a particular kind of moment, and that pattern is what makes it more than a piece of idle curiosity: it surfaces when he is at his lowest, which suggests it is standing in for something he is not able to ask directly. The sequence begins with loss. Being expelled from Pencey Prep triggers Holden to first think about the ducks, and after berating himself for being absent-minded he remembers the question and asks a taxi driver where he believes the birds go. He asks it again of another taxi driver, who tells him ducks fly south for the winter. The answer does not settle anything for him, which is the point — an ordinary factual reply cannot address what is actually being asked, because what is being asked is whether creatures that are turned out of the only place they know are looked after, or simply left. The last time, he stops asking and goes to look. After an evening of drinking at the bar, Holden decides to search for the ducks himself, cannot find any, and admits defeat. What immediately follows is the clearest indication of what the question has been carrying: he reflects on his own death and on how his family would react. The distance between a frozen pond and his own funeral is very short in his mind, and the novel puts the two together without comment, leaving the ducks as the form his distress takes when he cannot name it.

Premises

[P1]Holden raises the question of where Central Park's ducks go when the pond freezes precisely at his lowest moments, first after being expelled from Pencey Prep. [P2] His preoccupation with the vulnerable, displaced ducks recurs—asking taxi drivers, searching for them himself—and culminates in him reflecting on his own death, mirroring his fragile mental state. [C] Therefore, because the ducks symbolise Holden's psychological distress, The Catcher in the Rye is about mental illness.

Counter-arguments

Holden Caulfield only asks about the ducks in Central Park because he is genuinely curious about where they go in the winter when the pond freezes over. Everyone he asks plays off the questions as absurd, and he is left without an answer until a cab driver tells him they fly south.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Holden Caulfield thinks about the ducks only because he is curious about where they go when the pond freezes over.