The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by American author J.D. Salinger published in 1951. The novel details two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from prep school. Confused and disillusioned, Holden searches for truth and rails against the “phoniness” of the adult world. He ends up exhausted and emotionally unstable. The events are related by Holden after the fact in vivid, humorous language, with a great deal of teenage slang. A self-admitted “terrific liar,” Holden is both the quintessential unreliable narrator and a portrait of youthful alienation and grief.

The Catcher in the Rye is considered to be a classic of 20th-century American fiction. An especially popular choice for high school literature courses, the novel had sold 75 million copies by the early 21st century. Salinger’s storytelling and use of language influenced many other novels told in first-person narration.

Plot summary and characters

From what is implied to be a sanatorium, Holden tells the story of his adventures before the previous Christmas. The story begins with Holden at Pencey Prep School on his way to the house of his history teacher, Spencer, so that he can say goodbye. He reveals to the reader that he has been expelled for failing most of his classes. After he visits Spencer, he encounters his roommate, Ward Stradlater, who asks Holden to write an essay for him for English class while he goes on a date with a longtime friend of Holden’s. Having agreed, Holden writes about the baseball glove of his younger brother, Allie, who died of leukemia. When Stradlater returns, he tells Holden that the essay isn’t good, and Holden gets angry when Stradlater refuses to say whether he had sex with his date. This causes Holden to storm out and leave Pencey for New York City a few days earlier than planned for Christmas break.

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Once Holden arrives in New York, he cannot go home, as his parents do not yet know that he has been expelled. Instead, he rents a room at the Edmont Hotel, where he witnesses some sexually charged scenes through the windows of other rooms. His loneliness then causes him to seek out human interaction, which he does at the Lavender Room, the hotel’s nightclub. After interacting with some women there, he goes to another nightclub, only to leave after seeing his elder brother’s ex-girlfriend. When he gets back to the hotel, he orders a prostitute to his room, only to talk to her. This situation ends in him being punched in the stomach.

The next morning, Holden calls Sally Hayes, an ex-girlfriend of his. They spend the day together until Holden makes a rude remark and she leaves crying. Holden then meets up with a former schoolmate, Carl Luce, at a bar, but Luce leaves early because he becomes annoyed by Holden’s immature comments. Holden stays behind and gets drunk by himself. After he leaves, he wanders in Central Park until the cold drives him to his family’s apartment. He sneaks in, still not prepared to face his parents, and finds his 10-year-old sister, Phoebe. She is upset when she hears that Holden has failed out and accuses him of not liking anything.

Holden describes to his sister his fantasy of being “the catcher in the rye,” which was inspired by a song he heard a little boy singing: “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye.” Phoebe tells him that the words are “If a body meet a body coming through the rye,” from a poem by Robert Burns. (Burns’s poem, “Comin thro’ the Rye,” exists in several versions, but most render the lines as “Gin a body meet a body / Comin thro’ the rye.”) Soon they hear their parents come home after a night out, and Holden sneaks away. He calls his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who tells Holden he can come stay at his apartment. Holden falls asleep on Antolini’s couch and awakes to Antolini stroking his forehead, which Holden interprets as a sexual advance. He immediately excuses himself and heads to Grand Central Station, where he spends the rest of the night.

When he awakes, he goes to Phoebe’s school and leaves a note telling her that he plans to run away and asking her to meet him at a museum during lunch. She arrives with a packed bag and insists on going with him. He tells her no and instead takes her to the zoo, where he watches her ride the carousel in the pouring rain. This is where the flashback ends. The novel closes with Holden explaining that he has fallen “sick” but is expected to go to a new school in the fall.

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Interpretation and themes

The Catcher in the Rye takes the loss of innocence as its primary concern. Holden wants to be the “catcher in the rye”—someone who saves children from falling off a cliff, which can be understood as a metaphor for entering adulthood. As Holden watches Phoebe on the carousel, engaging in childlike behavior, he is so overcome with happiness that he is, as he puts it, “damn near bawling.” By taking her to the zoo, he allows her to maintain her childlike state, thus being a successful “catcher in the rye.” During this time, however, watching her and the other children on the carousel, he has also come to accept that he cannot save everyone: “The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off.”

Holden’s name is also significant: Holden can be read as “hold on,” and Caulfield can be separated into caul and field. Holden’s desire is to “hold on” to the protective covering (the caul) that encloses the field of innocence (the same field he wishes to keep the children from leaving). Holden desperately wants to remain true and innocent in a world full of, as he puts it, “phonies.”

Holden is often held up by critics as a classic example of teenage alienation. His use of sarcasm and slang are seen as being representative of a phase that many young people go through as they transition to adulthood. However, his behavior is also typical of someone who is grieving, which Holden is: His younger brother, Allie, has only recently died, on July 18, 1946. “You’d have liked him,” Holden says. “He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent.” Holden’s idealization of his dead brother is another example of his attempt to hold on to innocence.

Holden’s emotional state is also understood to make him unreliable as a narrator. Ironically, he tells the reader as much, although he couches it by bragging about his habit of lying:

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on the way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.

Publication, initial reception, and similarities to Salinger’s life

The Caulfield family was one Salinger had already explored in a number of stories that had been published by different magazines. Holden appeared in some of those stories, even narrating one, but he was not as richly fleshed out in them as he would be in The Catcher in the Rye. Notably, the sole story that Holden narrates, titled “I’m Crazy” and published in Collier’s in 1945, was written shortly after Salinger’s release from a military hospital, where he had been treated for “combat fatigue” (post-traumatic stress disorder). Salinger’s experience in the army during World War II had included fighting in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The war and mental illness are recurring themes in many of his works. Moreover, Salinger once admitted in an interview that The Catcher in the Rye was semi-autobiographical.

The novel, unlike the other stories of the Caulfield family, had difficulties getting published. Originally solicited by Harcourt, Brace and Company, the manuscript was rejected after the head of the trade division asked whether Holden was supposed to be crazy. Then Salinger’s agent, Dorothy Olding, approached Little, Brown and Company, which published the novel in 1951. After Little, Brown bought the manuscript, Salinger showed it to The New Yorker, assuming that the magazine, which had published several of his short stories, would want to print excerpts from the novel. The New Yorker rejected it, however, as the editors found the Caulfield children too precocious to be plausible and Salinger’s writing style exhibitionistic.

The Catcher in the Rye’s reception was lukewarm at first. Many critics were impressed by Holden as a character and, specifically, by his style of narration. Salinger was able to create a character whose relatability stemmed from his unreliability—something that resonated with many readers. Time’s reviewer wrote, “[Salinger] charts the miseries and ecstasies of an adolescent rebel, and deals out some of the most acidly humorous deadpan satire since the late great Ring Lardner.…He can understand the adolescent mind without displaying one.”

Others, however, felt that the novel was amateur and unnecessarily coarse. In The New Republic, Anne L. Goodman wrote, “Holden Caulfield…is an extraordinary portrait, but there is too much of him.”

Legacy

After publishing The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger became a recluse. When asked for the rights to adapt it for Broadway or Hollywood, he emphatically declined. Despite Holden’s never having appeared in any form subsequent to that in Salinger’s novel, the character has had a long-lasting influence, reaching millions of readers, including two particularly notorious ones. In 1980 Mark David Chapman identified so wholly with Holden that he became convinced that murdering John Lennon would turn him into the novel’s protagonist. John W. Hinckley, Jr., the attempted assassin of U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1981, was also a fan of the novel.

Many critics see evidence of Salinger’s influence (especially Holden’s voice) in such works as Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963) and Dave Eggers’s memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Salinger’s novel also plays an important role in John Guare’s acclaimed play Six Degrees of Separation (1990).

The novel has been banned numerous times because of its salty language and sexual content, although it has remained influential and widely read into the 21st century.

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