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.
