Title:   The Catcher in the RyeAuthor: J.D. Salinger   

Author’s website:

ISBN: 978-0-140-23750-4 / Original publication date: 1951

Points: 4

TITLE-EXPLANATION:

The title is a fantasy of the main character, Holden. He tells his little sister that he

wants to be a catcher in rye. This way he can protect children from growing up. He gets the idea of a poem which he wrongly remembers and sings to his sister.

SETTING & TIME:

The story begins at the boarding school Pency Preparatory. After that Holden goes to New York City. It takes place in the December of 1950.

MAIN CHARACTER(S):

Holden Caulfield: Holden is the narrator of the story. He is a 16-year-old boy who just got expelled from school. He finds the world ugly and the people cynical. He doesn’t want to grow up. He has the desire to protect children from growing up. Holden is nice, but he has a big mouth. He doesn’t make a big change throughout the story, but at the end he is being helped for his mental problems. This wasn’t the case at the start.

PLOT & STRUCTURE:

Holden is expelled from school. After he got into a fight with his roommate, he decides to leave school early at night. He can’t go home yet, because his parents aren’t aware of the fact that he is expelled. He spends three days in New York. He searches for ways to make himself happy but doesn’t find any. He meets a lot of people. All the events lead to a mental breakdown. At the end of the book, it appears that Holden tells his story from a psychiatric institution.

The book is structured as a character story. We read what Holden thinks and goes through. We read about his forced transition into adulthood. 

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE:

The story is written in first person. The main character tells the story. We are inside his head and can read everything he says and thinks. He refers to himself as ‘I’. The narration can be seen as unreliable. The narrator isn’t objective and uses a lot of sarcasm. The speech style is almost only oral language used by Holden Caulfield, who speaks in the American teenage slang of the 1950’s. He often uses the words as they are pronounced, for example: “Sonuvabitch”, “C’mon”, and “Wuddayacallit”. The book is written in past tense. Everything has already happened.

GENRE + THEME(S):

The Catcher in the Rye is a psychological novel and coming of age story. The whole story is about Holdens feelings and thoughts. These feelings and thoughts are mainly about growing up. This makes it also a coming of age story.

The main theme of the book is growing up. The ‘Rye’ is a metaphor for growing up. Holden wants to protect children from growing up and going through the same things as him.

CLIMAX/TURNING POINT:

The climax of the story takes place on page 142 when Holden visits his sister Phoebe. She becomes angry at him for being kicked out of school. She confronts his about the fact that he doesn’t like anything. He explains his fantasy about being a catcher in the rye. Phoebe corrects the misunderstanding of the words from the poem. This implies that Holden is wrong about both childhood and adulthood.

SHORT SUMMARY:

From what is implied to be a sanatorium, Holden, the narrator and protagonist, 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 English class for him 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. Once he 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. It is at this time that 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’ 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.