The Catcher in the Rye

This is the book that gave teenagers their voice in American fiction: slangy, furious, funny, and secretly heartbroken. Read it for the pleasure of Holden's company — his rants against phonies, his tenderness toward his sister, his grief for his dead brother. It matters for anyone who has ever felt sixteen and furious at the world, and for anyone trying to understand a teenager they love.

1. 1

   Act 1

   Expelled, and Out the Door

   Holden Caulfield narrates from a sanatorium home in California, recovering after becoming 'run-down'. He says he won't tell 'all that David Copperfield kind of crap' about his childhood and will tell about the 'madman stuff' that happened around last Christmas, when he was sixteen. The story begins on the Saturday of the last football game at Pencey Prep in Agerstown, Pennsylvania, which Holden watches from Thomsen Hill because he has just been expelled for failing four subjects (he passed only English), and has left the fencing team's equipment on the subway. He dislikes the school's ads showing 'splendid, clear-thinking young men' and its motto 'Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men,' saying they never really mold boys into anything. In the evening Holden visits his history teacher, old Mr. Spencer, at his home. Mr. Spencer reads aloud Holden's failed exam essay about the Egyptians (which ends with a note telling Spencer not to worry) and says, 'Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.' Holden agrees aloud but privately thinks, 'Game, my ass. Some game.' Later, Holden's roommate Ward Stradlater, a handsome, clean-shaven 'yearbook' type who is a 'secret slob' with a dirty razor, asks Holden to write a descriptive English composition for him because he has a date. The date turns out to be Jane Gallagher, a girl Holden knew and cared about. Holden becomes agitated and tells Stradlater about Jane's habit of keeping all her kings in the back row when they played checkers, and about her stepfather Mr. Cudahy, who used to come into the room (running around the house naked in his underwear) while Jane was with Holden. Afterward Holden writes Stradlater's composition about his younger brother Allie's baseball mitt, which was covered with poems written in green ink so Allie would have something to read while standing in the outfield during games. Allie died of leukemia on July 18, 1946, at age eleven, and that night Holden broke all the windows in the garage with his fist; he kept the mitt. Stradlater returns from his date with Jane and complains about the composition, calling it 'a goddamn composition.' Holden persistently asks whether he 'gave her the time' (had sex with her); Stradlater says, 'That's a professional secret, buddy,' and refuses to answer. They fight: Holden punches him first, but Stradlater pins Holden down and bloodies his nose, and Holden calls him a moron. Holden then reads the composition and tears it up. After the fight, Holden asks to sleep in Ackley's room but Ackley refuses. Holden decides to leave Pencey that night instead of waiting until Wednesday, packs his bags, puts on his red hunting hat, and shouts 'Sleep tight, ya morons!' down the dorm corridor as he leaves by the back stairs, crying, and heads to the train station to catch a train to New York City, planning to stay in a hotel until Wednesday.

2. 2

   Act 2

   Three Days Alone in New York

   On the train to New York, Holden meets the mother of his Pencey classmate Ernest Morrow. He lies to her, calling himself 'Rudolf Schmidt' and telling her that Ernest is the most popular boy at school (whom Holden actually dislikes), and that Holden himself is going home early for a brain tumor operation. Holden arrives at Penn Station, considers calling several people (including Jane Gallagher, but he isn't in the mood), and takes a cab to the Edmont Hotel in New York. From his window he watches guests in other rooms: a man taking out a woman's dress and putting on women's silk stockings, high heels and a girdle, and a man and woman squirting water (mouthwash) back and forth from their mouths. Holden is obsessed with the question of where the ducks in the lagoon near Central Park South go in the wintertime when the lagoon freezes over; he asks it of several cab drivers (two different ones), but neither gives him a satisfactory answer. He calls Faith Cavendish, a woman whose number he got from a Princeton acquaintance, hoping for a date; she suggests meeting for a drink the next day, but he insists on that night and she refuses. In the Lavender Room, the hotel's nightclub, Holden is too young to drink, orders a Coke, and dances with three women from Seattle (Bernice, Marty, and Laverne), whom he finds boring. Holden takes a cab driven by Horwitz to Ernie's, a jazz nightclub in Greenwich Village. In the cab he asks Horwitz, 'Where do the ducks go in the winter when the lagoon in Central Park freezes over?' Horwitz gets irritated and says the fish stay right in the frozen lagoon and take in nourishment through their pores. At Ernie's, Holden watches Ernie play piano and criticizes him for being too good a show-off. Back at the Edmont, the elevator operator Maurice offers to send a prostitute to Holden's room for five dollars, and Holden agrees. When the young prostitute Sunny arrives (Holden guesses she is about twelve or thirteen, though she claims to be older), she takes off her dress, but Holden tells her he just had an operation on his 'clavichord' and cannot do anything; he only wants to talk and pays her five dollars. She sits on his lap and says a boy in a movie who looked like him fell off a boat. Sunny returns with Maurice, who demands another five dollars. Holden refuses, saying they agreed on five. Maurice pins him against the wall while Sunny takes the money from his wallet, and Maurice snaps his finger into Holden's stomach, punching him. Holden calls Maurice a 'dirty moron'; lying on the floor, crying and talking to Allie, he imagines himself as a movie hero shooting Maurice in his stomach twice with an automatic. The next morning Holden checks out of the Edmont and has breakfast at a sandwich bar, where he meets two nuns with cheap suitcases. He donates ten dollars to their collection, and he enjoys discussing 'Romeo and Juliet' and books with one of the nuns, who is an English teacher. One nun asks if he goes to school, and he says, 'Yes, I do,' though he has just been expelled. He also calls Sally Hayes and arranges to meet her for a matinee. Holden meets his former girlfriend Sally Hayes at the Biltmore for a matinee of the Lunts in a play, which Holden hates, finding the actors 'all so damn phony'. At the skating rink at Radio City (Rockefeller Center), he impulsively proposes that they run away together to Vermont or Massachusetts and live in a cabin. Sally refuses, saying they're just children and calling him crazy, and Holden tells her, 'You give me a royal pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth.' She starts to cry, he apologizes, but she tells him to go home, and he leaves. After Sally leaves, Holden sees a movie at Radio City with a war documentary and then a sentimental feature, then goes to the Wicker Bar in the Seton Hotel to meet Carl Luce, an older boy from his time at Whooton School, with whom he has arranged drinks. At the Wicker Bar, Holden pesters Carl Luce with questions about sex and his personal life, annoying him. Luce tells Holden he needs to see a psychoanalyst and leaves early, and Holden gets drunk. He tries to make a date with the hat-check girl, but she refuses.

3. 3

   Act 3

   Phoebe, and the Catcher in the Rye

   Drunk, Holden calls Sally Hayes late at night and tells her he will come over on Christmas Eve to help trim her tree; she tells him to go to bed (her grandmother answers in one account, and she hangs up). Wandering into Central Park, he breaks Phoebe's record 'Little Shirley Beans' and keeps the pieces in his pocket. He can't find the ducks. becomes convinced he will disappear every time he steps off a curb, and talks aloud to his dead brother Allie, saying, 'Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Please, Allie.' Sitting near the lagoon, he starts to think he is dying of pneumonia and decides to sneak home to see Phoebe. His parents are out at a party in Norwalk, Connecticut. He finds his ten-year-old sister Phoebe asleep in D.B.'s room, watches her and reads her notebooks, then wakes her. She throws her arms around him, delighted, but then realizes he has been expelled again and repeatedly says 'Daddy'll kill you!' Phoebe tells Holden he doesn't like anything that happens and challenges him to name one thing he likes a lot. He can only think of Allie and the nuns (and mentions James Castle, a boy at Elkton Hills who, bullied, jumped out a window to his death, and the Museum of Natural History, where 'everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move'). He describes his fantasy of being 'the catcher in the rye': little kids playing some game in a big field of rye near a crazy cliff, and he, standing on the edge, catching everybody if they start to go over the cliff — the only thing he'd really like to be. Phoebe corrects him: the poem by Robert Burns says 'If a body meet a body comin' through the rye,' not 'catch a body'. Holden admits he didn't know but insists he likes his version better. Holden calls his former English teacher Mr. Antolini, who invites him to stay over. Before leaving, Holden gives Phoebe his red hunting hat, and she makes him promise to come back (she gives him her Christmas money, which makes him cry). He dances with her to the radio ('Little Shirley Beans,' which he had broken). their parents come home, and Holden hides in the closet until they go to bed.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Fall, and the Carousel

   At Mr. Antolini's apartment on Sutton Place, the former English teacher (who was the first to retrieve James Castle's body) tells Holden he is riding for a terrible, horrible fall — a special kind of fall in which the man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He quotes the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel: '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.' Holden falls asleep on Mr. Antolini's couch and wakes in the night to find Antolini sitting on the floor next to the couch in the dark, stroking his head. Holden says, 'What the hellya doing?', interprets it as a homosexual ('flitty') advance, dresses abruptly, and leaves, saying he has to get his bags from Grand Central, where he spends the rest of the night. Walking up Fifth Avenue, Holden begins to feel he will never get to the other side of the street before a car comes. 'Allie, don't let me disappear,' he begs, and makes it across each time. Deciding to go away for good — to hitchhike west, get a job, and live as a deaf-mute — he leaves a note for Phoebe with her school's secretary asking her to meet him at the Museum of Art at lunchtime. While waiting at the museum, he sees 'Fuck you' written on the wall and rubs it off, then finds another scratched in with a knife, which he cannot erase. Phoebe arrives at the museum (Metropolitan Museum of Art) carrying Holden's old suitcase, insisting she is going with him. He refuses angrily to take her, and she becomes furious, upset, and won't speak to him (she drops, dropping his red hunting hat). To cheer Phoebe up, Holden takes her to the Central Park Zoo and then buys her a ticket for the carousel. As she rides, going around and around (reaching for the gold ring), it starts to rain and Holden gets soaked. He says, 'I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around... I was damn near bawling. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don't know why', and he decides to stay home. He says he got sick ('pretty run-down') and is in a sanatorium in California near his brother D.B., who comes to see him 'practically every week'; he says he might go back to school in September but isn't sure. 'Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.'

• HHolden CaulfieldA sixteen-year-old expelled from Pencey Prep who can't stand phoniness and can't stop grieving his brother Allie. He wants to protect children from falling into adulthood; what he gets is a beating, a breakdown, and the sight of his sister on a carousel.
• PPhoebe CaulfieldHolden's ten-year-old sister, smart and skinny and the only one in the family he really likes. She calls out his emptiness, demands he name one thing he likes, and refuses to let him run away without her.
• AAllie CaulfieldHolden's younger brother, dead of leukemia at eleven, whose baseball mitt covered in green-ink poems Holden carries in his memory. Holden talks to him when he's afraid of disappearing.
• JJane GallagherHolden's childhood friend and crush, who kept her kings in the back row at checkers. He never calls her, and Stradlater's date with her sets the whole weekend in motion.
• MMr. AntoliniHolden's former English teacher, the first to retrieve James Castle's body, who warns Holden about the terrible fall. Waking to find the man stroking his head, Holden flees, disillusioned.
• WWard StradlaterHolden's handsome, secretly slovenly roommate who dates Jane Gallagher and won't say what happened. Their fight sends Holden out of Pencey a night early.

The red hunting hat

Holden buys it in New York for a dollar after losing the fencing equipment, and it makes him feel warm worn with the peak around to the back — a badge of being different. Giving it to Phoebe before he leaves is handing over the part of himself that wants to be protected; when she drops it outside the museum, his armor and his plan both hit the ground.

Allie's baseball mitt

Covered with poems in green ink so Allie had something to read in the outfield, the mitt stands for a dead brother and a childhood Holden can't put down. Writing the composition about it is his way of telling Stradlater the most private thing he has — and having it called 'a goddamn composition' is why they fight.

The ducks in the frozen lagoon

Holden keeps asking cab drivers where the ducks go when the Central Park lagoon freezes over. It's his own question in disguise: what happens to a vulnerable creature when its world turns cold? He never gets an answer, and he never finds the ducks — but the lagoon is where he decides to sneak home to Phoebe.

The carousel

The carousel goes around and around without going anywhere, and Phoebe reaching for the gold ring is the risk Holden's catcher fantasy tried to forbid. Watching her fall off might be possible — kids do reach, and sometimes they fall — is what makes him 'so damn happy' in the rain. It's the moment he stops trying to catch children and lets one grow up in front of him.

The Museum of Natural History

Holden loves it because 'everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move.' It's his dream of freezing childhood in place. The 'Fuck you' he can't erase there shows the fantasy failing: the world changes whether he guards it or not, and Phoebe arrives at the museum refusing to stay frozen.

The carousel is the quiet climax: Holden has spent the whole book wanting to catch children before they fall, and here he watches his sister reach for the gold ring, in the rain, and feels happy without being able to say why. The standard reading is that he finally accepts that kids have to be allowed to reach and even fall — that growing up can't be prevented, only witnessed. A darker reading notes that he's narrating from a sanatorium: the happiness is a moment, not a cure, and the epilogue's flatness — sick, maybe back to school in September, 'Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody' — suggests the telling itself is the symptom and the remedy at once. It lands because Salinger refuses to resolve it: Holden doesn't announce he's grown up. He just gets soaked, nearly cries, and decides to stay home.

1. 1.Is Holden's fantasy of being 'the catcher in the rye' noble or delusional — and does Phoebe's correction of the Burns poem ('meet' vs. 'catch') undermine or complete it?
2. 2.Holden lies constantly while condemning phoniness. Is the hypocrisy a character flaw, a symptom of grief, or Salinger's joke on the reader?
3. 3.The novel is narrated from a rest home after the events. How does knowing the ending is institutionalization change the way you read the carousel scene and the final line?

Anyone who remembers being sixteen and furious at everything fake, and anyone raising or teaching a teenager who seems angry for no reason. It's also essential for readers of American fiction who want the book every coming-of-age story since has been measured against.

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