The Catcher in the Rye

A teenager tells his own story

The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. It is J. D. Salinger's only novel, and it is told entirely by its narrator, Holden Caulfield, from a rest home in California where he is recovering from some kind of collapse. He says he will tell only about the "madman stuff" that happened to him the previous December, around Christmas. The whole book covers about three days.

Holden's voice is the book. He talks the way a sixteen-year-old in 1949 talked: slang, repetition, digressions, "and all," "it really was," "if you want to know the truth." He insults almost everyone and admits that he lies constantly. He is also sharp, funny and often kind. The reader has to decide how far to trust him, which is the main pleasure and the main difficulty of the novel.

Two facts sit under everything he says. His younger brother Allie died of leukemia three years earlier, when Holden was thirteen. Holden broke all the windows in the garage with his fist the night Allie died, and his hand still does not close properly. And his older brother D.B., a writer Holden admired, has moved to Hollywood to write for films, which Holden counts as a kind of selling out. Holden rarely says that he is grieving. He shows it by the things he cannot let go of.

Pencey Prep: the expulsion

The story opens on a Saturday in December at Pencey Prep in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Holden has been expelled for failing four of his five subjects, and he is to leave after Christmas break. It is his fourth school. He skips the big football game and visits his old history teacher, Mr. Spencer, who is sick in bed. Spencer reads Holden's failed exam essay about the Egyptians aloud and tells him that life is a game you play by the rules. Holden thinks that life is a game only if you are on the side that has all the hot shots.

Back in the dorm, Holden puts on a red hunting hat he bought that morning in New York. The hat becomes his emblem for the rest of the book. His neighbor Ackley, with bad skin and worse manners, wanders in. Then his roommate Stradlater arrives. Stradlater is handsome, confident and, in Holden's phrase, a secret slob. He asks Holden to write an English composition for him because he has a date.

The date is Jane Gallagher, a girl Holden knew two summers earlier. Jane kept all her kings in the back row when they played checkers. She once cried while playing, and Holden suspects her stepfather had been abusive. Holden is upset that Stradlater, who treats girls casually, is taking her out. He writes the composition about Allie's baseball mitt, which Allie had covered with poems in green ink so he had something to read in the outfield. When Stradlater returns, he rejects the essay as off topic. Holden tears it up. He asks what happened on the date, and Stradlater will not say. Holden swings at him, Stradlater pins him and bloodies his nose. That night Holden decides to leave Pencey early. He sells his typewriter, packs and walks out, shouting "Sleep tight, ya morons!" down the corridor.

New York: hotels, bars and a prostitute

On the train Holden meets the mother of a classmate, Ernest Morrow, and tells her a string of lies about how popular and modest her son is, under a false name. He arrives in New York late on Saturday night. He cannot go home, because his parents do not yet know about the expulsion, so he takes a room at the shabby Edmont Hotel. From his window he watches a man dress in women's clothes and a couple spit drinks at each other in other rooms. He thinks about calling Jane and does not. He calls a woman named Faith Cavendish, whose number he got from a college student, and gets nowhere.

In the hotel's Lavender Room he dances with three women from Seattle who are in town to see celebrities. One of them, Bernice, is a good dancer and a dull conversationalist. He pays for their drinks and is left alone. He takes a cab to Ernie's, a jazz club in Greenwich Village, and on the way asks the driver, as he has asked another, where the ducks in the Central Park lagoon go in winter. Neither driver knows. The question runs through the book. At Ernie's he meets Lillian Simmons, an old girlfriend of D.B.'s, and leaves to avoid her.

Back at the hotel, the elevator operator, Maurice, offers to send a prostitute to his room for five dollars. Holden says yes. The girl, Sunny, is about his age. When she takes off her dress, he feels more depressed than sexy, and he tells her he had an operation and just wants to talk. He pays her five dollars. She says the price was ten. Later, Maurice and Sunny return for the other five. Maurice punches Holden in the stomach and Sunny takes the money from his wallet. Holden lies on the floor imagining he has been shot and is a film hero. He admits that films ruin you.

Sunday: nuns, Sally Hayes and a record for Phoebe

On Sunday morning Holden checks his bags at Grand Central and eats breakfast beside two nuns who are schoolteachers. He talks to one of them about Romeo and Juliet and gives them ten dollars. He likes them because they do not seem to want anything from him. He walks up Broadway and sees a family with a small boy who walks along the curb singing "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." The boy's parents ignore him. The song makes Holden feel less depressed.

He buys a record called "Little Shirley Beans" for his sister Phoebe and goes to the park to look for her. He meets a girl who knows Phoebe but cannot find her. He visits the Museum of Natural History, where he spent many school trips, and thinks about why he loves it: everything in the glass cases stays the same, while you change every time you come back. He decides not to go in.

He has a date with Sally Hayes, a pretty, conventional girl he has known for years. They go to a matinee of a play with the Lunts, which Sally loves and Holden finds phony. They go skating at Rockefeller Center. Holden suddenly asks her to run away with him to Massachusetts or Vermont, to live in a cabin and chop wood. She says they are practically children and that there will be time for such things after college. He calls her a royal pain in the ass, and she leaves in tears. He admits he would not have gone with her anyway.

That evening he meets Carl Luce, an older student from a former school, for drinks at the Wicker Bar. Luce once gave sex talks in the dorm. Holden asks him intrusive questions about his sex life and his Chinese girlfriend. Luce suggests Holden should see a psychoanalyst, as Luce's father is one, and leaves. Holden stays and gets drunk. He calls Sally late at night and babbles about trimming her Christmas tree. He walks to the Central Park lagoon to see whether the ducks are there, breaks the record for Phoebe on the way, and nearly cries when he finds it in pieces. At the lagoon there are no ducks. He sits on a bench and imagines dying of pneumonia and his funeral. He decides to sneak home and see Phoebe.

Phoebe and the catcher in the rye

Holden lets himself into the family apartment late at night while his parents are out. He wakes Phoebe. She is ten, red haired, smart, and she figures out at once that he has been kicked out again. She says, "Daddy'll kill you." She asks him to name one thing he likes. He thinks of Allie and of James Castle, a boy at Elkton Hills who jumped from a window rather than take back something he said about a bully, and who was wearing a sweater he had borrowed from Holden. Phoebe says Allie is dead and does not count.

Then Holden tells her what he wants to be. He pictures thousands of little kids playing in a big field of rye near a cliff. He stands at the edge and catches anyone who starts to go over. He would be "the catcher in the rye." Phoebe corrects him: the Robert Burns line is "if a body meet a body," not "catch a body." His whole fantasy is built on a misheard song. Phoebe gives him her Christmas money, and he cries.

Holden calls Mr. Antolini, a former English teacher who once carried James Castle's body away, and goes to his apartment. Antolini has been drinking. He warns Holden that he is heading for "a terrible, terrible fall," and quotes a psychoanalyst: 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 the couch. He wakes to find Antolini sitting on the floor stroking his head. Holden panics, assumes something sexual, dresses and leaves. Later he admits that he may have misread the gesture.