The catcher in the rye - J.D. Salinger ©1945, 1946, 1951 by J.D Salinger
First published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston,1945
Blackbirds 1992, no. 2
Title
The catcher in the rye. The title refers to a poem by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, in which there’s a line “If a body meet a body coming through the rye”. Holden misunderstands, thinking that Burns wrote catch instead of meet. It makes him picture to himself children playing in a rye-field, while he is standing on the edge of a cliff to catch them if they go over it. ‘Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have tot do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catche them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.’ Subtitle
There is no subtitle

Pages
284
Genre
Psychological novel. Book contains elements of the novel of social protest and the picaresque or neo-piqaresque novel. Theme
A teenagers confrontation with experience. Composition
The end
Closed end, Holden goes home. Narrative technique
The book is a long monologue. The reader sees everything through Holden’s eyes. Language
It’s not a difficult book to read, although there were some words I didn’t know. The language of The Catcher in the Rye is a faithful reproduction of the American teenage slang of the 1950s. The story
Place
New York
Time
A few weeks
When does the story take place? Just before Christmas. Main characters
Holden Caulfield: 16 year old ‘student’, gets kicked out of every school because he doesn’t work. He doesn’t like phonies. He’s got an older brother, D.B., who’s a writer in Hollywood and a 9 year old sister, Phoebe. He had another brother, Allie, but he died. Phoebe Josephine Caulfield (she calls herself Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield): 9 year old sister of Holden. The end
Holden goes home. The catcher in the rye - J.D. Salinger

Holden Caulfield is a 16 year old student at Pencey, but he gets kicked out because he fluncted everything except English. He doesn’t want to stay at Pencey until Christmas vacation, so he just leaves.On the first night the book discribes he has a fight with his roommate Wald Stradlater, spends the night in Ackleys room and leaves in evening. Holden spends a lot of money on drinks and hotels. The elevator guy at the hotel, Maurice, offers him a night with a prostitute for 5 bucks. He accepts. When the prostitute comes he doesn’t want to do anything and he gives Sunny the 5 bucks, but she wants 10. He doesn’t give it to her. Later that night Maurice and Sunny come to his room to get 5 bucks more. Maurice hits Holden and takes the money. The next day Holden calls Sally Hayes for a date. They go ice-skating and they go to ‘I know my love’ (benefit performance, orchestra). He has a drink that night with an old ‘friend’ and gets drunk after he’s gone. Holden goes home. He sneaks into the house and goes to Phoebe, his 9 year old sister. He wakes her, she gets angry when she finds out he’s kicked out of Pencey. They talk and when his parents get home (they were gone, visiting friends) he sneaks out again. Phoebe lends him her christmas dough and Holden goes to a teacher he knew from Elkton hills, Mr. Antolini. He sleeps on the couch, but suddenly he wakes up because Mr. Antolini is patting him on the head. Holden thinks he was making a flitty pass and he leaves. He goes to the waiting room at the station and spends the rest of the night there. Holden decides to go out west, but he wants to see Phoebe again and give her back her money. He goes to her school and asks somebody to bring her a note saying where and when to meet him and that he’ll go west. When he meets Phoebe she has a bag with clothes and she says she wants to go with him. He says he’s going to go alone. This makes Phoebe angry. Holden says he’s not going and he doesn’t make her go back to school that afternoon, because she doesn’t want to go anymore. When she’s not angry anymore, she asks him if he was serious about not leaving and then they go home.