CHAPTER I
A. INTRODUCTION
The Catcher in the Rye, novel by 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
after the fact.
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’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.
B. HISTORY OR BACKGROUND OF THE NOVEL/AUTHOR
J.D. Salinger, in full Jerome David Salinger, (born January 1, 1919, New York, New York,
U.S.—died January 27, 2010, Cornish, New Hampshire), American writer whose novel The
Catcher in the Rye (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the
post-World War II generation of college students. His corpus of published works also
consists of short stories that were printed in magazines, including the “The Saturday Evening
Post, Esquire, and The New Yorker”.
Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and, like Holden Caulfield,
the hero of The Catcher in the Rye, he grew up in New York City, attending public schools
and a military academy. After brief periods at New York and Columbia universities, he
devoted himself entirely to writing, and his stories began to appear in periodicals in 1940.
After Salinger’s return from service in the U.S. Army (1942–46), his name and writing style
became increasingly associated with The New Yorker magazine, which published almost all
of his later stories. Some of the best of these made use of his wartime experiences: “For
Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (1950) describes a U.S. soldier’s poignant encounter with
two British children; “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) concerns the suicide of the
sensitive, despairing veteran Seymour Glass.
SUMMARY
Major critical and popular recognition came with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye,
whose central character, a sensitive, rebellious adolescent, relates in authentic teenage
idiom his flight from the “phony” adult world, his search for innocence and truth, and his
final collapse on a psychiatrist’s couch. The humour and colourful language of The Catcher in
the Rye place it in the tradition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the
stories of Ring Lardner, but its hero, like most of Salinger’s child characters, views his life
with an added dimension of precocious self-consciousness. Nine Stories (1953), a selection
of Salinger’s short stories, added to his reputation. Several of his published pieces feature
the siblings of the fictional Glass family, beginning with Seymour’s appearance in “A Perfect
Day for Bananafish.” In works such as Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof
Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), the introspective Glass children,
influenced by their eldest brother and his death, navigate questions about spirituality and
enlightenment. The reclusive habits of Salinger in his later years made his personal life a
matter of speculation among devotees, and his small literary output was a subject of
controversy among critics. The last work Salinger published during his lifetime was a novella
titled Hapworth 16, 1924, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1965. In 1974 The Complete
Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, an unauthorized two-volume work of his early
pieces, was briefly released to the public, but sales were halted when Salinger filed a lawsuit
for copyright infringement.
C. DEFINITION OF TERMS

Jerome David Salinger
United States writer (born 1919)
Title: The Catcher In The Rye
Author: Jerome David Salinger
Setting: The majority of the novel takes place in New York City during post war America.

Phony - fraudulent; having a misleading appearance

Immaturity - inappropriately childish behavior or manner

Mental institution - a hospital for mentally incompetent or unbalanced person

Ice skate - skate consisting of a boot with a steel blade fitted to the sole

Nervous breakdown - a severe or incapacitating emotional disorder

Train station - terminal where trains load or unload passengers or goods

Girlfriend - a girl or woman with whom one is romantically involved

Incapability - the quality of not being capable -- physically or intellectually or legally

Catcher - the position on a baseball team of the player who is stationed behind
home plate and who catches the balls that the pitcher throws

Self-destruct - do away with oneself or itself

Phoebe - (Greek mythology) a Titaness who became identified with Artemis as
goddess of the Moon

Boarding school - a private school where students are lodged and fed

Roommate - an associate who shares a room with you

Breakdown - the act of disrupting an established order so it fails to continue

Destruct - do away with, cause the destruction or undoing of

Introverted - shy, reserved, or inward looking

Flashback - a transition in a story to an earlier event or scene
D. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NOVEL
It’s based on Holden’s preferred occupation. He wants to be “the catcher in the rye” when
he grows up. In a conversation with Phoebe, he recalls hearing a child singing a poem (which
the child misquotes) that goes “if a body, catch a body, coming through the rye.” From this,
he uses his imagination to create a sort of occupation where he is the designated “catcher”
of children about to accidentally run off a cliff when playing in a rye field.
Does it sound weird? Yes. However, Holden is revealing something about himself when he
says he wants to have this as his full-time job. It reveals that he values children, specifically
their innocence. He doesn’t want them to fall off the cliff, in the same way that he sees
himself falling off a metaphorical cliff (into adulthood). He observes the differences between
the innocence of childhood and the “phoniness” (William Blake would call it “experience”)
of the adult world. So the title boils down to an expression of Holden’s desire to preserve
innocence in the face of a world that doesn’t value it.
SUMMARY
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.
The Catcher in the Rye was also linked to John W. Hinckley, Jr.’s attempted assassination of
U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1981. The novel remained influential into the 21st century;
indeed, many American high schools included it in their curriculum. The novel has been
banned numerous times because of its salty language and sexual content.
CHAPTER II
SUMMARIZING
The Catcher in the Rye is set around the 1950s and is narrated by a young man named
Holden Caulfield. Holden is not specific about his location while he’s telling the story, but he
makes it clear that he is undergoing treatment in a mental hospital or sanatorium. The
events he narrates take place in the few days between the end of the fall school term and
Christmas, when Holden is sixteen years old.
Holden’s story begins on the Saturday following the end of classes at the Pencey prep school
in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Pencey is Holden’s fourth school; he has already failed out of
three others. At Pencey, he has failed four out of five of his classes and has received notice
that he is being expelled, but he is not scheduled to return home to Manhattan until
Wednesday. He visits his elderly history teacher, Spencer, to say goodbye, but when
Spencer tries to reprimand him for his poor academic performance, Holden becomes
annoyed.
Back in the dormitory, Holden is further irritated by his unhygienic neighbor, Ackley, and by
his own roommate, Stradlater. Stradlater spends the evening on a date with Jane Gallagher,
a girl whom Holden used to date and whom he still admires. During the course of the
evening, Holden grows increasingly nervous about Stradlater’s taking Jane out, and when
Stradlater returns, Holden questions him insistently about whether he tried to have sex with
her. Stradlater teases Holden, who flies into a rage and attacks Stradlater. Stradlater pins
Holden down and bloodies his nose. Holden decides that he’s had enough of Pencey and will
go to Manhattan three days early, stay in a hotel, and not tell his parents that he is back.
On the train to New York, Holden meets the mother of one of his fellow Pencey students.
Though he thinks this student is a complete “bastard,” he tells the woman made-up stories
about how shy her son is and how well respected he is at school. When he arrives at Penn
Station, he goes into a phone booth and considers calling several people, but for various
reasons he decides against it. He gets in a cab and asks the cab driver where the ducks in
Central Park go when the lagoon freezes, but his question annoys the driver. Holden has the
cab driver take him to the Edmont Hotel, where he checks himself in.
From his room at the Edmont, Holden can see into the rooms of some of the guests in the
opposite wing. He observes a man putting on silk stockings, high heels, a bra, a corset, and
an evening gown. He also sees a man and a woman in another room taking turns spitting
mouthfuls of their drinks into each other’s faces and laughing hysterically. He interprets the
couple’s behavior as a form of sexual play and is both upset and aroused by it. After
smoking a couple of cigarettes, he calls Faith Cavendish, a woman he has never met but
whose number he got from an acquaintance at Princeton. Holden thinks he remembers
hearing that she used to be a stripper, and he believes he can persuade her to have sex with
him. He calls her, and though she is at first annoyed to be called at such a late hour by a
complete stranger, she eventually suggests that they meet the next day. Holden doesn’t
want to wait that long and winds up hanging up without arranging a meeting.
Holden goes downstairs to the Lavender Room and sits at a table, but the waiter realizes
he’s a minor and refuses to serve him. He flirts with three women in their thirties, who seem
like they’re from out of town and are mostly interested in catching a glimpse of a celebrity.
Nevertheless, Holden dances with them and feels that he is “half in love” with the blonde
one after seeing how well she dances. After making some wisecracks about his age, they
leave, letting him pay their entire tab.
As Holden goes out to the lobby, he starts to think about Jane Gallagher and, in a flashback,
recounts how he got to know her. They met while spending a summer vacation in Maine,
played golf and checkers, and held hands at the movies. One afternoon, during a game of
checkers, her stepfather came onto the porch where they were playing, and when he left
Jane began to cry. Holden had moved to sit beside her and kissed her all over her face, but
she wouldn’t let him kiss her on the mouth. That was the closest they came to “necking.”
Holden leaves the Edmont and takes a cab to Ernie’s jazz club in Greenwich Village. Again,
he asks the cab driver where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter, and this cabbie is
even more irritable than the first one. Holden sits alone at a table in Ernie’s and observes
the other patrons with distaste. He runs into Lillian Simmons, one of his older brother’s
former girlfriends, who invites him to sit with her and her date. Holden says he has to meet
someone, leaves, and walks back to the Edmont.
Maurice, the elevator operator at the Edmont, offers to send a prostitute to Holden’s room
for five dollars, and Holden agrees. A young woman, identifying herself as “Sunny,” arrives
at his door. She pulls off her dress, but Holden starts to feel “peculiar” and tries to make
conversation with her. He claims that he recently underwent a spinal operation and isn’t
sufficiently recovered to have sex with her, but he offers to pay her anyway. She sits on his
lap and talks dirty to him, but he insists on paying her five dollars and showing her the door.
Sunny returns with Maurice, who demands another five dollars from Holden. When Holden
refuses to pay, Maurice punches him in the stomach and leaves him on the floor, while
Sunny takes five dollars from his wallet. Holden goes to bed.
He wakes up at ten o’clock on Sunday and calls Sally Hayes, an attractive girl whom he has
dated in the past. They arrange to meet for a matinee showing of a Broadway play. He eats
breakfast at a sandwich bar, where he converses with two nuns about Romeo and Juliet. He
gives the nuns ten dollars. He tries to telephone Jane Gallagher, but her mother answers the
phone, and he hangs up. He takes a cab to Central Park to look for his younger sister,
Phoebe, but she isn’t there. He helps one of Phoebe’s schoolmates tighten her skate, and
the girl tells him that Phoebe might be in the Museum of Natural History. Though he knows
that Phoebe’s class wouldn’t be at the museum on a Sunday, he goes there anyway, but
when he gets there he decides not to go in and instead takes a cab to the Biltmore Hotel to
meet Sally.
Holden and Sally go to the play, and Holden is annoyed that Sally talks with a boy she knows
from Andover afterward. At Sally’s suggestion, they go to Radio City to ice skate. They both
skate poorly and decide to get a table instead. Holden tries to explain to Sally why he is
unhappy at school, and actually urges her to run away with him to Massachusetts or
Vermont and live in a cabin. When she refuses, he calls her a “pain in the ass” and laughs at
her when she reacts angrily. She refuses to listen to his apologies and leaves.
Holden calls Jane again, but there is no answer. He calls Carl Luce, a young man who had
been Holden’s student advisor at the Whooton School and who is now a student at
Columbia University. Luce arranges to meet him for a drink after dinner, and Holden goes to
a movie at Radio City to kill time. Holden and Luce meet at the Wicker Bar in the Seton
Hotel. At Whooton, Luce had spoken frankly with some of the boys about sex, and Holden
tries to draw him into a conversation about it once more. Luce grows irritated by Holden’s
juvenile remarks about gay men and about Luce’s Chinese girlfriend, and he makes an
excuse to leave early. Holden continues to drink Scotch and listen to the pianist and singer.
Quite drunk, Holden telephones Sally Hayes and babbles about their Christmas Eve plans.
Then he goes to the lagoon in Central Park, where he used to watch the ducks as a child. It
takes him a long time to find it, and by the time he does, he is freezing cold. He then decides
to sneak into his own apartment building and wake his sister, Phoebe. He is forced to admit
to Phoebe that he was kicked out of school, which makes her mad at him. When he tries to
explain why he hates school, she accuses him of not liking anything. He tells her his fantasy
of being “the catcher in the rye,” a person who catches little children as they are about to
fall off of a cliff. Phoebe tells him that he has misremembered the poem that he took the
image from: Robert Burns’s poem says “if a body meet a body, coming through the rye,” not
“catch a body.”
Holden calls his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who tells Holden he can come to his
apartment. Mr. Antolini asks Holden about his expulsion and tries to counsel him about his
future. Holden can’t hide his sleepiness, and Mr. Antolini puts him to bed on the couch.
Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini stroking his forehead. Thinking that Mr. Antolini is
making a sexual overture, Holden hastily excuses himself and leaves, sleeping for a few
hours on a bench at Grand Central Station.
Holden goes to Phoebe’s school and sends her a note saying that he is leaving home for
good and that she should meet him at lunchtime at the museum. When Phoebe arrives, she
is carrying a suitcase full of clothes, and she asks Holden to take her with him. He refuses
angrily, and she cries and then refuses to speak to him. Knowing she will follow him, he
walks to the zoo, and then takes her across the park to a carousel. He buys her a ticket and
watches her ride it. It starts to rain heavily, but Holden is so happy watching his sister ride
the carousel that he is close to tears.
Holden ends his narrative here, telling the reader that he is not going to tell the story of how
he went home and got “sick.” He plans to go to a new school in the fall and is cautiously
optimistic about his future.