The Catcher in the Rye

What's inside (11 sections)

1. Pencey and Stradlater
2. The train and Morrow
3. Ernie and the Edmont
4. Sunny and Maurice
5. Nuns and Sally Hayes
6. Luce and the lagoon
7. Phoebe and the fantasy
8. Antolini and the carousel
9. What does not hold
10. Key takeaways
11. FAQ

I read The Catcher in the Rye the wrong way first: on a train at nineteen, with an opinion about adults I could not have defended. Salinger published it in 1951 and it has been in the same argument ever since. What follows is the whole plot, twists and the ending included.

Holden Caulfield tells it from a rest home in California, where a psychoanalyst he calls "that guy" asked him to write it down. He is funnier than he wants to be, cruel to people who did nothing to him, and sincere about exactly two things: his dead brother Allie and his sister Phoebe. Everything else is filed as phony, and by the last page you must decide how much of that was judgment and how much armor.

Pencey and Stradlater

Pencey Prep advertises in a thousand magazines with some hotshot on a horse jumping a fence, captioned molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men since 1888. On the Saturday of the football game against Saxon Hall, Holden stands on Thomsen Hill beside a Revolutionary War cannon, freezing in a reversible jacket because somebody stole his coat. He has been expelled for failing four of his five subjects and is up there postponing the moment he has to tell his parents.

His roommate is Ward Stradlater: a secret slob with a rusty razor who has a date that night with Jane Gallagher. Jane is the girl Holden loved through two summers in Maine, the one who would never take her kings off the back row in checkers. Stradlater asks Holden to write his English composition, anything descriptive, and Holden writes about Allie's left-handed fielder's mitt, with poems written over the fingers and pocket in green ink so Allie would have something to read in the field.

If you came here looking for a dead puck, there is not one in this book; the nearest thing to hockey is the wrong pair of skates his mother bought him. What Holden has instead is a glove, a dead brother, and nobody who will let him say so. Stradlater reads the composition and says it is about a goldarn baseball glove. Holden tears it up, asks what happened with Jane, gets nothing, swings, and ends up on the floor with a bloody nose.

He leaves that night instead of Wednesday, sells his typewriter for twenty dollars, puts the hunting hat on with the peak to the back, and yells "Sleep tight, ya morons!" down the corridor.

The train and Morrow

On the train he meets Mrs Morrow, going home after visiting her son Ernest at Pencey. Holden has decided Ernest is one of the biggest bastards in the school, so he does the opposite of the truth: the boy is the most popular, the election was stolen from him because he is too modest, he is a wonderful mixer. He gives his name as Rudolf Schmidt, the janitor's, and invents a brain tumor when she asks why he is traveling: "It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain." She gets off at Newark inviting him to Gloucester for the summer; he says he is going to South America with his grandmother.

At Penn Station he stands in a phone booth twenty minutes unable to think of one person to call. D.B. is in Hollywood prostituting himself as a screenwriter, Phoebe is asleep, and the address book holds about three names. So he gives the cab driver his own address out of habit, catches himself, and goes to the Edmont.

Ernie and the Edmont

The Edmont is a crumby hotel where nobody bothers with shades, and the windows are a free show: a gray-haired man in his underpants putting on silk stockings, a brassiere and a black evening dress to walk up and down the room. Holden decides he is the only normal bastard in the building, and that is not saying much.

Downstairs the Lavender Room has three girls from Seattle who work in the same insurance office. They dance with a boy named Jim Steele, which is what Holden calls himself. Then they tell him he is a boy, not a man, and he walks off the floor on them. Back in the lobby he calls a Princeton girl whose number he got at a party, at half past one in the morning, and hangs up. He calls Sally Hayes and fixes a matinee for Sunday, and never calls Jane.

Then a cab to Ernie's in Greenwich Village, the club D.B. used before Hollywood. Ernie is a big, fat, gifted piano player with a mirror and a spotlight in front of him, and a snob who will hardly speak to anyone without a name. The room treats his playing like a religious event, and Holden says that if he were that good he would play in the closet, because people always clap for the wrong things. He runs into Lillian Simmons, one of D.B.'s old girls, and gets out, walking the forty-one blocks back instead of taking a cab.

Sunny and Maurice

In the elevator the operator Maurice, stocky and bored, asks if he is interested in a little tail tonight. Holden says yes. Sunny arrives: a dyed blonde in a blue dress, around his age or under, interested in the five dollars and the door. Holden has been waiting years for this moment and cannot do anything with it. He talks, tells her he just had an operation, and she gets crude. He pays her anyway, and she leaves insulted.

At daylight Maurice is at the door with Sunny, demanding five more dollars on a schedule Holden never heard: ten for a throw, fifteen till noon. Holden refuses, starts to cry, calls him a dirty moron, and takes a terrific punch in the stomach that drops him on the floor. Sunny takes the five from his wallet and they go. He runs a bath and rehearses shooting Maurice six times. Then he thinks about the window, not wanting a bunch of rubbernecks gawking at his body.

Nuns and Sally Hayes

The next morning he eats eggs at a counter and finds two nuns beside him with cheap suitcases and a straw collection basket, one teaching English, heading to a convent uptown. They talk about Romeo and Juliet, and Holden cares more about Mercutio than about the lovers, because it drives him crazy when somebody smart dies for somebody else's fault. He gives them ten dollars and spends the day annoyed that he did not give more, though he needed the change for tickets. He buys Phoebe the Little Shirley Beans record.

On his walk he hears a boy singing "If a body catch a body coming through the rye" while the cars zoom past and his parents ignore him, and he helps a little girl with no gloves tighten her skate. At two he meets Sally Hayes at the Biltmore. They see a matinee, then skate at Rockefeller Center. Over drinks Holden announces the plan: borrow a friend's car, drive up through Massachusetts and Vermont, live in a cabin, he will chop wood, they will both get jobs. Sally says he is impossible, and the argument climbs until he tells her she gives him a royal pain in the ass. She goes home by herself, and he feels rotten about it.

Luce and the lagoon

At ten he meets Carl Luce at the Wicker Bar in the Seton Hotel. Luce went to Whooton, is three years older, and used to give the boys late-night sex talks full of perverts and Lesbians. Holden asks how his sex life is, then asks for advice in a way he never quite finishes. Luce says it plainly: his mind is immature, his sex life is childish, and he should see a psychoanalyst instead of drinking with him. He leaves for his date, and Holden stays, gets very drunk, invents a bullet in his gut to keep the blood off his jacket, and calls Sally at midnight to offer to come trim her tree. He cries at the hat-check, collects his coat and Phoebe's record, and walks to Central Park.

He drops the record just inside the park and keeps fifty pieces in his pocket because he cannot throw them away. The lagoon is half frozen and there is not one duck on it. His hair is full of little hunks of ice, so he decides he is getting pneumonia and rehearses his own funeral: the tombstone, the flowers on his stomach, everybody driving off to dinner except Allie. He has three dollars, five quarters and a nickel left, and he skips the change across the open water. Then he decides he had better get home and see Phoebe in case he dies.

Phoebe and the fantasy

He sneaks into the apartment past a creaking front door, tells the elevator boy the wrong floor, and finds Phoebe awake. She knows immediately that he has been kicked out: Daddy is going to kill you. She asks what he likes, and he says he likes Allie, and sitting here with her, and she points out that Allie is dead. Then she asks what he would like to be, and he gives her the fantasy: all these kids playing in a big field of rye, thousands of them and nobody big around except him, standing on the edge of a crazy cliff, and whenever they start to go over he catches them. That is all he would do all day, the catcher in the rye. She tells him the poem says meet, not catch, and that it is Robert Burns, and he knows she is right.

He mentions James Castle, the boy who jumped out a window wearing a borrowed turtleneck, the one Mr Antolini carried in with his coat over his face. Then his parents come home, Holden hides in the closet, and Phoebe hands over her Christmas money because he is broke. He calls Mr Antolini, his old English teacher, now at N.Y.U., and goes.

Antolini and the carousel

Antolini's apartment on Sutton Place has a party just ending. He is nice, a little oiled, and he gives Holden real advice: he is at the top of a fall, and education is not about grades but about keeping the peace later. Holden falls asleep on the couch and wakes to find Antolini stroking his head. He does not know what to think, says he has to go, and runs. Later he admits he may have misread it and is sorry he ran.

It is three in the morning at Grand Central. In the morning he leaves a note at Phoebe's school saying he will hitch hike out west, asking her to meet him at the museum at quarter past twelve so he can give her money back. On the stairs he finds "Fuck you" written in pencil, rubs at it, finds another scratched with a knife, and later a third in red crayon under the glass in the Egyptian tomb, where he sits with the dead guys because it is peaceful: wherever you find a peaceful place, somebody will write it there under your nose.

At the door Phoebe arrives dragging a suitcase, wearing his hunting hat, wanting to go with him. He refuses, she cries, and then he gives up the idea: he is not going away anywhere. They go to the zoo, and then to Central Park, where the carrousel is still running. He buys her a ticket, and she rides the old brown horse around while "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" plays jazzy. The kids keep reaching for the gold ring and so does Phoebe, and Holden sits soaked through in the rain and says nothing: if they want to grab it they have to grab it, and if they fall off they fall off, though it is bad if you say anything. He feels so happy he is nearly bawling, and he tells her he really did go home afterwards.

That is all he is going to tell about. The last chapter happens back in the rest home in California: how he got sick, what school he goes to in the fall, the psychoanalyst asking whether he will apply himself. D.B. comes out from Hollywood and asks what he thinks of it all, and Holden does not know. He is sorry he told so many people, and yet he misses everybody he told it to, even Stradlater and old Ackley, even Maurice. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

What does not hold

The first honest complaint is Holden himself. He whines. He calls nearly every adult he meets a phony while lying to Mrs Morrow for fun, calling a stranger at half past one and hanging up, and telling Sally he will chop wood in Vermont. The phoniness complaint cuts both ways, and the book knows it more often than its defenders admit: Holden is performing the role of the only honest boy in New York, and the performance has its own vanity. When he despises Ernie for bowing to a crowd, he is describing his own hunger to be watched by one.

The plot is thin and episodic by design. He goes somewhere, is disappointed, says something sharp, and moves. Sunny, Maurice, the nuns, Luce, Sally: each is a scene rather than a person. Three days of a boy avoiding his father can feel like a held breath that never turns into a scream.

There is also the question of change. He ends soaked and happy on a bench, and the frame then puts him in California being asked if he will apply himself next September, which he thinks is a stupid question, because you do not know what you are going to do until you do it. The last line about missing everybody is one of the great closing sentences in American fiction, but it is also an exit from the problem: he stops talking before he has decided anything. Whether that is a breakdown, a small thaw, or a boy who learned only that confession makes him lonely is what Salinger leaves open. Readers who claim a full recovery are reading the book they wanted, not the one on the page.

None of this is fatal. The voice is the achievement: a sixteen-year-old who notices everything, gets it slightly wrong, and gets it exactly right in the same breath. The glove with green poems, the ducks nobody will explain, the carrousel in the rain while a ten-year-old reaches for a brass ring. That is why it keeps being handed to nineteen-year-olds on trains, and why they keep reading it the wrong way first.

FAQ

Why does Holden leave Pencey Prep before the end of term?

He has been expelled for failing four subjects and does not want to face his parents when they learn about it, so he books a room at the Edmont Hotel two days early and heads into Manhattan. The early departure is avoidance, not rebellion.

What does the catcher in the rye fantasy mean?

Holden mishears Robert Burns's poem and imagines children running through a field of rye near a cliff, with himself standing there to catch them before they fall. It is his way of saying he wants to protect kids, including his dead brother Allie and his sister Phoebe, from growing up and being hurt.

Does Holden change by the end of the novel?

He reaches a small moment of peace watching Phoebe ride the carousel, and he admits he misses the people he has been insulting. But the frame is a sanatorium where he has been recovering, and his final line about never telling anybody anything suggests the insight did not take.