The Catcher in the Rye Summary: Holden Caulfield's Lost Weekend in New York
What it is about
J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was published as a novel in 1951, after appearing partly in serial form between 1945 and 1946. It is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a teenager close to the age of adulthood, who looks back on a long weekend shortly before the previous year's Christmas. The book is short on incident and long on voice. Holden tells you what happened, then tells you what he thinks about almost everything else along the way.
The setup is simple. Holden has been expelled from Pencey Preparatory Academy, an elite boarding school, after failing every class except English. Rather than go straight home to his parents in New York, he decides to stay away until Wednesday. He takes a train into the city and spends several days drifting between hotels, bars, clubs and old acquaintances, with no plan and shrinking funds.
What follows is a sequence of encounters that mostly go wrong. He drinks and dances with adults who are far older than him. He hires an underage prostitute, Sunny, then refuses to sleep with her, and is beaten and robbed by her pimp, Maurice. He gives money to two nuns. He goes on a date with a girl he used to see. He corners an older former classmate at a club and badgers him with questions about sex. Beneath it all sits grief he rarely names directly: his younger brother Allie died of leukaemia at thirteen.
Salinger originally wrote the novel for adults. It was adolescents who claimed it, and Holden Caulfield became an icon of teenage rebellion.
The main characters
Holden Caulfield is the narrator and the whole weather system of the book. He is sharp, funny, snobbish, tender and unreliable in turns. He is contemptuous of what he sees as phoniness in the adult world, and at the same time desperate for connection with almost anyone who will sit still long enough.
Phoebe Caulfield is Holden's younger sister and the person he trusts most. He sneaks into the family apartment while his parents are out just to see her. She is the one who tells him off for being expelled and asks the question nobody else does: does he actually care about anything?
Allie Caulfield is Holden's dead younger brother. Asked to write an essay for his roommate, Holden writes about Allie instead, which tells you where his mind really is.
Ward Stradlater is Holden's roommate at Pencey, and the trigger for his departure. Stradlater takes Jane Gallagher out on a date, and refuses afterwards to say whether anything happened. They fight. Holden loses.
Jane Gallagher never appears directly. She is Holden's childhood friend and crush, and he carries real distress about her, including about her stepfather's behaviour towards her.
Mr Antolini is Holden's former English teacher, admired by Holden because he was the one who carried the body of a classmate who had died. Late in the book Holden goes to him for help, and the visit does not end the way Holden hoped.
The themes
The title comes from a mishearing. Holden imagines a field of rye on a clifftop, full of running children, and himself standing there to catch any of them before they fall. Phoebe corrects him: the line in Robert Burns is "when a body meet a body, comin' through the rye." The fantasy is about protecting innocence from a drop that Holden believes is coming, and the correction quietly points out that he has built his whole self-image on a misunderstanding.
Around that sit the themes the book is best known for: angst and alienation, and a running critique of superficiality in society. Salinger also works through innocence, identity, belonging, loss, connection, sex and depression. The deaths that haunt Holden, Allie's illness and the classmate who threw himself from a window to escape bullies, shape everything he does without ever being processed out loud.
Why it still matters
The numbers are unusual for a novel this old. Around a million copies sell every year, and total sales have passed 65 million. It has been widely translated. It appeared on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and came in at number 15 on the BBC's "Big Read" survey in 2003.
Its hold comes from the voice. Holden talks the way a specific kind of unhappy, clever teenager thinks, and readers keep recognising it. The book suits anyone drawn to first-person narrators, to novels about grief that never announce themselves as such, and to 1950s New York as a place to wander.
How it ends (spoilers)
Out of money and out of options, Holden decides to run away for good. He leaves a note at Phoebe's school and they meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to say goodbye. Instead of accepting it, she asks to come with him. He refuses, which upsets her badly. To make amends he takes her to the Central Park Zoo and buys her a ticket for the carousel. It starts to rain. Watching her go round makes him happy, and it is the one unguarded moment in the book. In the final pages Holden alludes to meeting his parents, falling ill, and being sent to a sanatorium in California near his older brother D. B. He says he hopes to go back to school in September.
