The Catcher in the Rye

“People always think something’s all true. I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am—I really do—but people never notice it. People never notice anything.”

One of the central conflicts of the book is rooted in Holden’s perception that the people around him don’t see him. He is a deeply wounded character, coping with his brother’s death and witnessing a suicide, but he also is unable to open up to the people around him, in part because he feels burdened by their expectations. His view represents the isolation and disillusionment of contemporary adolescents.

“One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. That’s all. They were coming in the goddam window.”

Holden has a complicated relationship with the idea of authenticity: on the one hand, he disdains the people around him who he sees as phony, but on the other, he readily tells lies himself. The difference, to Holden, is that he is not interested in the social striving that occupies most of his peers’ minds. This will also be revealed to not be the only reason Holden left Elkton Hills, as that’s where he witnessed the suicide of a classmate. Holden is hence bound up in The Lack of Authenticity in Adult Society even while he criticizes it.

“He took another look at my hat while he was cleaning them. ‘Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,’ he said. ‘That’s a deer shooting hat.’

‘Like hell it is.’ I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. ‘This is a people shooting hat,’ I said. ‘I shoot people in this hat.’”

Holden’s idle threat here is a hint at his fragile emotional state, and the hat that Holden bought will come to be a symbol of his attempt to assert himself as an individual throughout the book.

“‘Yeah. She wouldn’t move any of her kings. What she’d do, when she’d get a king, she wouldn’t move it. She’d just leave it in the back row. She’d get them all lined up in the back row. Then she’d never use them. She just liked the way they looked when they were all in the back row.’ Stradlater didn’t say anything. That kind of stuff doesn’t interest most people.”

Holden is talking about Jane Gallagher here, and this story marks a clear difference between Holden and most of his peers; Stradlater is most concerned with what he can get from Jane sexually, whereas Holden finds her innately interesting, and he has a curiosity about what her behavior says about her as a person. This conveys his Longing for Connection. That Jane would date someone like Stradlater troubles Holden throughout the book, especially given what he knows of her when they were younger and more innocent.

“All I did was close the window and walk around the room with the snowball, packing it harder. A little while later, I still had it with me when I and Brossard and Ackley got on the bus. The bus driver opened the doors and made me throw it out. I told him I wasn’t going to chuck it at anybody, but he wouldn’t believe me. People never believe you.”

There are times when the chip on Holden’s shoulder is justified; he is living in a world that doesn’t suit him, and he is not being given the space he needs to grieve his brother’s death. One thing that makes him a complicated character is moments like this one, as the bus driver is entirely justified in not letting a packed snowball onto his bus. It’s important to remember that Holden, in many ways, is still a kid. The snowball here represents The Desire to Preserve Childhood Innocence.

“I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence—there was this fence that went all around the course—and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That’s the kind of red hair he had.”

Holden’s descriptions of Allie throughout the book present him as an angelic, almost magical figure of innocence, and it’s clear that Holden misses his brother keenly. Allie also becomes a marker of what Holden is afraid to lose if he crosses into adulthood, making him another symbol of The Desire to Preserve Childhood Innocence.

“One thing about packing depressed me a little. I had to pack these brand-new ice skates my mother had practically just sent me a couple of days before. That depressed me. I could see my mother going in Spaulding’s and asking the salesman a million dopy questions—and here I was getting the ax again. It made me feel pretty sad. She bought me the wrong kind of skates—I wanted racing skates and she bought hockey—but it made me sad anyway. Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”

Holden doesn’t have the emotional maturity to articulate it, but he is a character with very low self-esteem rooted in the feeling that he doesn’t belong. The fact that his mother bought him the wrong skates underscores that he feels misunderstood. His sadness reflects the economic context of the United States during the economic boom, since Holden’s mot.

“When I was all set to go, when I had my bags and all, I stood for a while next to the stairs and took a last look down the goddam corridor. I was sort of crying. I don’t know why. I put my red hunting hat on, and turned the peak around to the back, the way I liked it, and then I yelled at the top of my goddam voice, ‘Sleep tight, ya morons!’ I’ll bet I woke up every bastard on the whole floor. Then I got the hell out.”

Any time Holden puts his red hunting hat on, it’s an assertion of some kind. Here, he rejects his own sadness about leaving another school by being openly defiant toward his peers. At the same time, his screaming at “the whole floor” reflects his Longing for Connection as his voice reaches everyone near him.

“He turned all the way around again, and said, ‘The fish don’t go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddam lake.’

‘The fish—that’s different. The fish is different. I’m talking about the ducks,’ I said.

‘What’s different about it? Nothin’s different about it,’ Horwitz said. Everything he said, he sounded sore about something. ‘It’s tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake.’”

The disparities between social classes are an undercurrent of Catcher in the Rye. Holden is squarely in New York’s upper class, and most of his interactions with working-class people happen in service exchanges. This cab driver confronts Holden, both due to the ridiculousness of his topic of conversation and because Holden’s empathy is focused on the species that has it easy.

“I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet.”

This passage exemplifies a recurring thought with Holden: he is suspicious of people who are talented and readily display that talent. In many ways, Holden fears success, and he lumps expertise in with the broader idea of phoniness with which he’s struggling.

“I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.”

Holden is much more interested in empathizing with the outcast than the 12 disciples, whom he sees as striving to be in Jesus’s good graces. This reflects his hatred for The Lack of Authenticity in Adult Society. This passage also emphasizes the violent imagery Holden often uses, suggesting that he has latent aggressiveness.

“The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding.”

Holden has a love/hate relationship with the movies. He claims to hate them, but they influence many of his thoughts, and his brother is in the industry. What really troubles Holden about the movies is two-fold: They set people up to have unreasonable expectations about their lives, and Holden’s own life isn’t living up to those expectations. Therefore, he often fantasizes about being a gangster, as he is doing here.

“The thing is, it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs—if yours are really good ones and theirs aren’t. You think if they’re intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don’t give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do. They really do.”

Here again is the class struggle from which Holden is often shielded, but he knows is happening around him. His roommate holds a grudge against Holden that Holden has no control over, which develops into mutual resentment.

“He was making out like he was walking a very straight line, the way kids do, and the whole time he kept singing and humming. I got up closer so I could hear what he was singing. He was singing that song, ‘If a body catch a body coming through the rye.’ He had a pretty little voice, too. He was just singing for the hell of it, you could tell. The cars zoomed by, brakes screeched all over the place, his parents paid no attention to him, and he kept on walking next to the curb and singing ‘If a body catch a body coming through the rye.’ It made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more.”

Seeing this child has a profound effect on Holden, and what he’s singing leads to Holden’s idea about what he’d like to be in life. This is Holden’s first interaction with a child in the book, and he begins to seek out those interactions, trying to reconnect with the innocence he feels is escaping him.

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times […] The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all. You’d have an overcoat on this time. […] Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you’d be different in some way—I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.”

Holden craves constancy, especially in his own growing up. He thinks of the museum as a place that’s primarily connected to class trips, and so his memories of Allie and his present understanding of Phoebe’s life are a big part of what he’s feeling here. The subtext of what he doesn’t feel like talking about is his knowledge that even though the museum stays the same, he must grow up, as does Phoebe, but Allie won’t.

“I remember Allie once asked him wasn’t it sort of good that he was in the war because he was a writer and it gave him a lot to write about and all. He made Allie go get his baseball mitt and then he asked him who was the best war poet, Rupert Brooke or Emily Dickinson. Allie said Emily Dickinson.”

D. B. is talking to Allie here, saying that his experience in the war was not good for him as an artist, as Allie assumes. However, Allie’s response can be read as an understanding that even someone like Emily Dickinson will suffer, even if it wasn’t in war, and that’s part of what makes her a meaningful artist.

“I didn’t want anybody to know I was even wounded. I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch. Finally what I felt like, I felt like giving old Jane a buzz and see if she was home yet.”

Holden is pretending again, but there’s a truth in it: Holden has spent the entirety of the novel concealing how wounded he is, and it’s starting to be something he can’t ignore. His pretend wound represents his emotional wounds. This language reflects the postwar context since it mimics warlike imagery of fighting through wounds.

“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,’ I said. ‘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 to 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 catch 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.’”

The passage that gives the book its title reveals what Holden wishes the world was like—one in which he can prevent young people from getting hurt, which includes making sure that they stay young and innocent. His vision lays out what he thinks his purpose should be, which is a direct response to his brother’s death and the inauthentic world of adulthood.

“The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It’s more interesting and all”

Holden likes digression because he feels that the façade that people put on falls away when they’re allowed to be themselves, the way his classmate is when his speech becomes about his uncle. Digression is also a big part of the narrative style of the book, as Holden tends to retreat into his mind and recall seemingly unrelated stories of his peers and siblings during the novel. The book is more interested in conveying Holden with authenticity than it is in telling a tightly plotted story.

“Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again.”

Toward the end of the book, Holden starts experiencing what seems to be a panic attack, which he doesn’t know how to handle. The feelings that he has been unable to articulate start to take their toll on him, and there is a sense that the events that take place in the gap between the events of the book and his narration of it are much more troubling than he lets on.

“That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck you.’ I’m positive, in fact.”

Holden is beginning to realize that there’s no place that’s safe from the adult world, and that innocence is something that cannot be preserved forever, which troubles him further, especially as he’s thinking about Phoebe and his brother.

“All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddam horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. 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, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.”

This passage is a revision of Holden’s earlier thought (being the “catcher in the rye”), as he realizes that part of what’s necessary for children is having the opportunity to fail. This reflects his new ideas about The Desire to Preserve Childhood Innocence, which he realizes is fruitless.

“My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.”

Two key things happen here: the symbol of the hunting hat resolves, as Phoebe puts it back on his head, and the protection he feels is rooted in the permission to be himself. The other key thing is that the “you” Holden refers to throughout the book seems to shift to include his brother Allie, as he grieves the people who are missing.