Novel:
The
Catcher in the Rye
J.D Salinger
Plot Overview
The Catcher in the Rye is set
around the 1950s and is narrated by a young man named Holden Caulfield. Holden
is not specific about his location while he’s telling the story, but he makes
it clear that he is undergoing treatment in a mental hospital or sanatorium.
The events he narrates take place in the few days between the end of the fall
school term and Christmas, when Holden is sixteen years old.
Holden’s story begins on the
Saturday following the end of classes at the Pencey prep school in Agerstown, Pennsylvania.
Pencey is Holden’s fourth school; he has already failed out of three others. At
Pencey, he has failed four out of five of his classes and has received notice
that he is being expelled, but he is not scheduled to return home to Manhattan
until Wednesday. He visits his elderly history teacher, Spencer, to say
goodbye, but when Spencer tries to reprimand him for his poor academic
performance, Holden becomes annoyed.
Back in the dormitory, Holden
is further irritated by his unhygienic neighbor, Ackley, and by his own
roommate, Stradlater. Stradlater spends the evening on a date with Jane
Gallagher, a girl whom Holden used to date and whom he still admires. During
the course of the evening, Holden grows increasingly nervous about Stradlater’s
taking Jane out, and when Stradlater returns, Holden questions him insistently
about whether he tried to have sex with her. Stradlater teases Holden, who
flies into a rage and attacks Stradlater. Stradlater pins Holden down and
bloodies his nose. Holden decides that he’s had enough of Pencey and will go to
Manhattan three days early, stay in a hotel, and not tell his parents that he
is back.
On the train to New York,
Holden meets the mother of one of his fellow Pencey students. Though he thinks
this student is a complete “bastard,” he tells the woman made-up stories about
how shy her son is and how well respected he is at school. When he arrives at
Penn Station, he goes into a phone booth and considers calling several people,
but for various reasons he decides against it. He gets in a cab and asks the
cab driver where the ducks in Central Park go when the lagoon freezes, but his
question annoys the driver. Holden has the cab driver take him to the Edmont
Hotel, where he checks himself in.
From his room at the Edmont,
Holden can see into the rooms of some of the guests in the opposite wing. He
observes a man putting on silk stockings, high heels, a bra, a corset, and an
evening gown. He also sees a man and a woman in another room taking turns
spitting mouthfuls of their drinks into each other’s faces and laughing
hysterically. He interprets the couple’s behavior as a form of sexual play and
is both upset and aroused by it. After smoking a couple of cigarettes, he calls
Faith Cavendish, a woman he has never met but whose number he got from an
acquaintance at Princeton. Holden thinks he remembers hearing that she used to
be a stripper, and he believes he can persuade her to have sex with him. He
calls her, and though she is at first annoyed to be called at such a late hour
by a complete stranger, she eventually suggests that they meet the next day.
Holden doesn’t want to wait that long and winds up hanging up without arranging
a meeting.
Holden goes downstairs to the
Lavender Room and sits at a table, but the waiter realizes he’s a minor and
refuses to serve him. He flirts with three women in their thirties, who seem
like they’re from out of town and are mostly interested in catching a glimpse
of a celebrity. Nevertheless, Holden dances with them and feels that he is “half
in love” with the blonde one after seeing how well she dances. After making
some wisecracks about his age, they leave, letting him pay their entire tab.
As Holden goes out to the
lobby, he starts to think about Jane Gallagher and, in a flashback, recounts
how he got to know her. They met while spending a summer vacation in Maine,
played golf and checkers, and held hands at the movies. One afternoon, during a
game of checkers, her stepfather came onto the porch where they were playing,
and when he left Jane began to cry. Holden had moved to sit beside her and
kissed her all over her face, but she wouldn’t let him kiss her on the mouth.
That was the closest they came to “necking.”
Holden leaves the Edmont and
takes a cab to Ernie’s jazz club in Greenwich Village. Again, he asks the cab
driver where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter, and this cabbie is
even more irritable than the first one. Holden sits alone at a table in Ernie’s
and observes the other patrons with distaste. He runs into Lillian Simmons, one
of his older brother’s former girlfriends, who invites him to sit with her and
her date. Holden says he has to meet someone, leaves, and walks back to the
Edmont.
Maurice, the elevator operator
at the Edmont, offers to send a prostitute to Holden’s room for five dollars,
and Holden agrees. A young woman, identifying herself as “Sunny,” arrives at
his door. She pulls off her dress, but Holden starts to feel “peculiar” and
tries to make conversation with her. He claims that he recently underwent a
spinal operation and isn’t sufficiently recovered to have sex with her, but he
offers to pay her anyway. She sits on his lap and talks dirty to him, but he
insists on paying her five dollars and showing her the door. Sunny returns with
Maurice, who demands another five dollars from Holden. When Holden refuses to
pay, Maurice punches him in the stomach and leaves him on the floor, while
Sunny takes five dollars from his wallet. Holden goes to bed.
He wakes up at ten o’clock on
Sunday and calls Sally Hayes, an attractive girl whom he has dated in the past.
They arrange to meet for a matinee showing of a Broadway play. He eats
breakfast at a sandwich bar, where he converses with two nuns about Romeo and
Juliet. He gives the nuns ten dollars. He tries to telephone Jane Gallagher,
but her mother answers the phone, and he hangs up. He takes a cab to Central
Park to look for his younger sister, Phoebe, but she isn’t there. He helps one
of Phoebe’s schoolmates tighten her skate, and the girl tells him that Phoebe
might be in the Museum of Natural History. Though he knows that Phoebe’s class
wouldn’t be at the museum on a Sunday, he goes there anyway, but when he gets
there he decides not to go in and instead takes a cab to the Biltmore Hotel to
meet Sally.
Holden and Sally go to the
play, and Holden is annoyed that Sally talks with a boy she knows from Andover
afterward. At Sally’s suggestion, they go to Radio City to ice skate. They both
skate poorly and decide to get a table instead. Holden tries to explain to
Sally why he is unhappy at school, and actually urges her to run away with him
to Massachusetts or Vermont and live in a cabin. When she refuses, he calls her
a “pain in the ass” and laughs at her when she reacts angrily. She refuses to
listen to his apologies and leaves.
Holden calls Jane again, but
there is no answer. He calls Carl Luce, a young man who had been Holden’s
student advisor at the Whooton School and who is now a student at Columbia
University. Luce arranges to meet him for a drink after dinner, and Holden goes
to a movie at Radio City to kill time. Holden and Luce meet at the Wicker Bar
in the Seton Hotel. At Whooton, Luce had spoken frankly with some of the boys
about sex, and Holden tries to draw him into a conversation about it once more.
Luce grows irritated by Holden’s juvenile remarks about homosexuals and about
Luce’s Chinese girlfriend, and he makes an excuse to leave early. Holden
continues to drink Scotch and listen to the pianist and singer.
Quite drunk, Holden telephones
Sally Hayes and babbles about their Christmas Eve plans. Then he goes to the
lagoon in Central Park, where he used to watch the ducks as a child. It takes
him a long time to find it, and by the time he does, he is freezing cold. He
then decides to sneak into his own apartment building and wake his sister,
Phoebe. He is forced to admit to Phoebe that he was kicked out of school, which
makes her mad at him. When he tries to explain why he hates school, she accuses
him of not liking anything. He tells her his fantasy of being “the catcher in
the rye,” a person who catches little children as they are about to fall off of
a cliff. Phoebe tells him that he has misremembered the poem that he took the
image from: Robert Burns’s poem says “if a body meet a body, coming through the
rye,” not “catch a body.”
Holden calls his former
English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who tells Holden he can come to his apartment.
Mr. Antolini asks Holden about his expulsion and tries to counsel him about his
future. Holden can’t hide his sleepiness, and Mr. Antolini puts him to bed on
the couch. Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini stroking his forehead. Thinking
that Mr. Antolini is making a homosexual overture, Holden hastily excuses
himself and leaves, sleeping for a few hours on a bench at Grand Central
Station.
Holden goes to Phoebe’s school
and sends her a note saying that he is leaving home for good and that she
should meet him at lunchtime at the museum. When Phoebe arrives, she is
carrying a suitcase full of clothes, and she asks Holden to take her with him.
He refuses angrily, and she cries and then refuses to speak to him. Knowing she
will follow him, he walks to the zoo, and then takes her across the park to a
carousel. He buys her a ticket and watches her ride it. It starts to rain
heavily, but Holden is so happy watching his sister ride the carousel that he
is close to tears.
Holden ends his narrative
here, telling the reader that he is not going to tell the story of how he went
home and got “sick.” He plans to go to a new school in the fall and is
cautiously optimistic about his future.
CRITICISM
Catcher is
the type of book that makes me wish that I was with Holden the whole. Catcher
in the Rye is the type of novel that I enjoy because of its humor, picturesque
descriptions, and characterizations. When Holden introduced himself, he said
that he's not going to tell us his whole biography. He wanted to let us
understand that this book is a new type of novel. This novel would be much more
different than the Great Gatsby or Charles Dickens' Victorian novels. Though
he's the narrator, he is definitely not the protagonist or the antagonist. He
also critizes his own essay in a very amusing way. Holden also has a heart and
common sense. He also calls everybody ‘morons'. That symbolizes his hatred of
everybody and the first step in his morbid condition. Ordinary People and
Catcher in the Rye are two different stories, but they part of the same puzzle.
Catcher in the Rye explained Holden’s internal emotions, while Ordinary People
focused on Conrad’s family problems for him. Ordinary People build and
strengthens the ideas of psychiatric problems for a troubled teen in Catcher in
the Rye.
As its title
indicates, the dominating theme of The Catcher in the Rye is the protection of
innocence, especially of children. For most of the book, Holden sees this as a
primary virtue. It is very closely related to his struggle against growing up.
Holden's enemy is the adult world and the cruelty and artificiality that it
entails. The people he admires all represent or protect innocence. He thinks of
Jane Gallagher, for example, not as a maturing young woman but as the girl with
whom he used to play checkers. He goes out of his way to tell us that he and
Jane had no sexual relationship. Quite sweetly, they usually just held hands.
Holden comforted Jane when she was distressed, and it bothers him that Jane may
have been subjected to sexual advances from her drunken stepfather or from her
date, Holden's roommate, Stradlater.
Holden's
secret goal is to be "the catcher in the rye." In this metaphor, he
envisions a field of rye standing by a dangerous cliff. Children play in the
field with joy and abandon. If they should come too close to the edge of the
cliff, however, Holden is there to catch them. His attitude seems to shift near
the end of the novel when he realizes that Phoebe and other children must be
allowed to "grab for the gold ring," to choose their own risks and
take them, even though their attempts may be dangerous.
The end of
the book demonstrates significant growth on the part of Holden. Although at
first Holden is quick to condemn those around him as phony (like Stradlater and
Ackley), his more recent encounters with others prove that he is becoming more
tolerant and less judgmental. This is evidenced after the ordeal with Mr.
Antolini, where Holden is determined not to make any conclusions about his
teacher. This growth contributes to Holden’s fantasy of being a catcher in the
rye. Despite his inability and fear of becoming an adult, he has found his role
in keeping the innocence of other children protected. This is shown when he
tries to scratch out the obscenities at Phoebe’s elementary school. He imagines
himself on a cliff, catching innocent children (like himself at one time) who
accidently fall off the cliff, bridging the gap between childhood and
adulthood.
HEY told me you had been to her,
