Summary: Chapter 16
After breakfast, Holden goes for a walk. He thinks about
the selflessness of the nuns and can’t imagine anyone he knows being
so generous and giving. He heads down Broadway to buy a record called
“Little Shirley Beans” for Phoebe. He likes the record because,
although it is for children, it is sung by a black blues singer who
makes it sound raunchy, not cute. He thinks about Phoebe, whom he
considers to be a wonderful girl because, although she’s only ten,
she always understands what Holden means when he talks to her. He
sees an oblivious little boy walking in the street, singing, “If
a body catch a body coming through the rye.” The innocence of the
scene cheers him up, and he decides to call Jane, although he hangs
up when her mother answers the phone. In preparation for his date
with Sally, he buys theater tickets to a show called “I Know My Love,”
which stars the Lunts.
The best thing, though, in that museum
was that everything always stayed right where it was.
See Important Quotations Explained
Holden wants to see Phoebe, and he goes to look for her
in the park because he remembers that she often roller-skates there
on Sundays. He meets a girl who knows Phoebe. At first, she tells
him that his sister is on a school trip to the Museum of Natural
History, but then she remembers that the trip was the previous day.
Nevertheless, Holden walks to the museum, remembering his own class
trips. He focuses on the way life is frozen in the museum’s exhibits:
models of Eskimos and Indians stand as though petrified and birds
hang from the ceiling, seemingly in mid-flight. He remarks that
every time he went to the museum, he felt that he had changed, while
the museum had stayed exactly the same.
Summary: Chapter 17
At two o’clock, Holden goes to meet Sally at the Biltmore
Hotel; she is late but looks very attractive, so he immediately
forgives her tardiness. They make out in the taxi on the way to
the theater. At the play, the actors annoy Holden because, like
Ernie the piano player, they are almost too good at what they do
and seem full of themselves. During intermission, Sally irritates
Holden by flirting with a pretentious boy from Andover, another
prep school, but he nonetheless agrees to take her ice-skating at
“Radio City” (Radio City Music Hall is part of Rockefeller Center,
where there is an ice-skating rink) after the show. While skating,
Holden speculates that Sally only wanted to go ice-skating so she
could wear a short skirt and show off her “cute ass,” but he admits
that he finds it attractive. When they take a break and sit down
indoors, Holden begins to unravel. Oscillating between
shouting and hushed tones, he rants about all the “phonies” at his
prep schools and in New York society, and talks about how alienated
he feels. He becomes even more crazy and impetuous, saying that
he and Sally should run away together and escape from society, living
on their own in a cabin. When she points out that his dreams are
ridiculous, he becomes more and more agitated. The
quarrel builds until Holden calls Sally a “royal pain in the ass,”
and she begins to cry. Holden starts to apologize, but Sally is
upset and angry with him, and, finally, he leaves without her.
Analysis: Chapters 16–17
Things go from bad to worse for Holden in these chapters.
His behavior during his date with Sally is the surest sign yet that
he is heading toward emotional collapse. Throughout his tirade,
Sally asks Holden to stop yelling, and he claims not to have been
yelling, indicating that he is unaware of his own extreme agitation.
His attempt to convince a shallow socialite like Sally to run away
with him to a cabin in the wilderness also shows his increasing
distance from reality—or, at least, his inability to deal with the
reality in which he finds himself.
Though Holden admits his behavior is odd when
he says, “I swear to God I’m a madman,” he doesn’t do much to explain
its significance. Salinger continues to drop hints—like Sally’s requests
for Holden to stop yelling—to signal that the story behind Holden’s
narration is darker and more troubling than it might at first appear.
His mood swings with Sally serve a similar purpose. When he first
sees her, he is convinced he is in love with her. He then alternates
between annoyance and rapturous passion for the duration of their
date, until he finally tells her that she gives him “a royal pain
in the ass.” Sally’s coldness and her lack of compassion are reflective
of the greater world’s lack of concern about Holden’s plight. Except
for Jane and Phoebe, no one in his world seems to care how he feels,
so long as he observes social norms. Only when his actions violate
those norms does anyone notice his disturbed state, and even then,
their usual response, like Sally’s, is to criticize him. Despite
the fact that Sally is obviously not a good match for him, Holden
claims that at the moment he proposed that they run away together,
he did truly love her. His feelings are irrational, but they indicate
how desperate he is to find love.
This desperate need for love is counterbalanced by his
inability to deal with the complexities of the real world. Like
his encounter with the nuns in Chapter 15, his date with Sally demonstrates
how ill-equipped he is to deal with actual people. Sally does not
seem to be a very complex character, but Holden cannot connect with
her at all. His wild proposals are not the kind of thing Sally is
interested in, and he displays callousness when he insults her.
As Holden proposes impossible schemes only to lash out when their
ridiculousness is made apparent, his oversimplified, idealized fantasy
world begins to seem less endearing and more dangerous.
