The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Content and Description

In summer 1951, when Little, Brown published The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger had been writing and revising it for a decade. Two of Salinger’s early, uncollected stories show the evolution of Salinger’s first and only novel: “I’m Crazy” (Collier’s, December 22, 1945) was an early prototype of Holden’s visit with Spencer in chapters 1 and 2; “Slight Rebellion off Madison” (New Yorker, December 21, 1946) grew into the Holden/Sally Hayes episode in chapter 17. At the time of their publication, neither story seemed destined to grow into one of the 20th century’s most successful novels.

The Salinger scholar Joel Salzberg sums up the novel’s impact: “The Catcher in the Rye has enjoyed a readership that has transcended the boundaries of age, education and culture, a phenomenon unparalleled in the history of modern and contemporary literature” (Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye 1).

A story of adolescent angst in post-World War II America, The Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield’s first-person account of the days after his dismissal from Pencey Prep, a private boarding school in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Having suffered a psychological collapse, Holden recounts the novel’s events several months later from a psychiatric hospital. In the first of three movements, Holden leads the reader through his final hours at Pencey: his guilt-ridden conversation with a concerned teacher, his aggravated encounter with his unhygienic dorm neighbor, and his angry confrontation with his roommate.

Growing increasingly agitated, Holden leaves the campus earlier than planned, taking a train to nearby New York, where he plans to “lay up” in a hotel for a few days before skulking home to his disappointed parents. The New York hotel sequence marks the novel’s second movement, when Holden initiates a series of failed attempts to connect with old friends and new acquaintances. The final movement begins when, in a last-ditch effort to communicate with a kindred spirit, Holden goes home late at night, sneaks into his parents’ apartment, and awakens his 10-year-old sister, Phoebe. Speaking to her in an unusually candid way, he confesses his desire to save other children from the “phony” world that has driven him crazy.

When Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield return from a party, Holden slips out and takes a cab to the nearby home of a former teacher, Mr. Antolini, who, in the past, has offered sound paternal advice. On this night, however, Antolini’s compassion borders on sexual affection, and Holden, frightened and disillusioned, abruptly departs. The following day, determined to leave his life behind and make a new start “out west,” Holden meets Phoebe at an art gallery to say good-bye, but Phoebe derails his plans when she arrives with her own suitcase. Instead of leaving town, Holden takes Phoebe to the nearby carousel, where he finds a sudden, inexplicable joy watching his sister go “around and around.”

The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story tracking the protagonist’s psychological, moral, and/or intellectual development. Although critics debate the extent of Holden’s maturation, most agree that a subtle change becomes evident in the novel’s closing paragraphs. For most of the narrative, however, he is static. As do many of the people he criticizes, Holden suffers from an inability to see the world from alternate points of view. Holden’s limitations notwithstanding, Catcher portrays a psychologically nuanced, conflicted young man who is alternately kind and misanthropic, depressed and elated, gullible and cynical, arrogant and self-deprecating, imaginative and paralyzed.

As Holden cycles through contradictory personality traits, he struggles to fuse his inner and outer selves into a consistent whole. In scene after scene Holden’s behavior—his performance in the exterior world—contradicts his interior monologue. For instance, while talking to Stradlater in the bathroom, Holden professes to “hate the movies like poison” but imitates them with an “exhibitionist” tap dance routine; elsewhere, he lambastes “phonies” and “phoniness,” yet he exaggerates his experiences and often lies without any discernible motivation. His ideas and actions wedged apart, Holden searches in vain for an authentic identity.

Holden’s lack of personal integrity underscores one of Catcher’s central themes: Through social and cultural influence, the external world undermines individual autonomy, forcing the genuine self to wither or disappear altogether. Much of the narrative records Holden’s gut-level reaction to his own lack of autonomy, a reaction that leads him to dismiss everyone else—with the exception of young children and his dead brother, Allie—as a phony. Although Holden never defines phony, he uses it to describe a person whose beliefs and actions mirror prevailing cultural mores.

As it turns out, every adolescent and adult meets the criterion, including, paradoxically, Holden himself. In a revealing passage Holden describes the intermission of the play he attends with Sally Hayes: “At the end of the first act we went out with all the other jerks for a cigarette. What a deal that was. You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were”. Ironically, Holden precedes this tirade with his own assessment of the play. Like the phonies with whom he shares a cigarette, he is determined to prove his intelligence.

Although he would never admit it, Holden suspects he is, like everyone else, a phony. Underneath his adolescent complaints lies a deep-seated fear of losing control over his identity, of becoming another drone in a swarm of human bees. The terror causes him to retreat inward and eventually precipitates a nervous breakdown. He finds the pressure to conform so debilitating that, when asked what he wants to do in life, he fails to imagine a single realistic answer. Instead, he misappropriates a Robert Burns poem, telling Phoebe he would enjoy being in charge of catching “little kids playing . . . in this big field of rye [when] they start to go over the cliff.” While the impracticality of his career ambitions points to an underlying psychological illness, the passage underscores Holden’s desire to save others from experiencing similar anguish. On the other side of the “cliff” the phony world awaits. Having seen its horrors, having succumbed to its pressures, Holden naively hopes to prevent children from replicating his mistakes.

Like that of many of Salinger’s short stories, Catcher's ending is ambiguous. As the novel closes, a question lingers: Given the infeasibility of Holden’s catcher in the rye model, is there an alternative for saving the innocent? While this question remains open to interpretation, the final scene points to a possible answer. For Holden, Phoebe symbolizes innocence. She is a living example of the children Holden wants to “catch” before they succumb to a phony, materialistic existence. As Phoebe rides the carousel, Holden notes, “All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the . . . 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” (273-274). For Holden the gold ring symbolizes phony decadence. When Phoebe reaches for it, she, as do the children on the edge of a “crazy cliff,” risks falling from innocence. Yet, Holden no longer wants to play the savior’s role. Phoebe must face the risk on her own terms. So too must Holden, though it remains unclear whether he accepts responsibility for himself. Throughout the novel Holden searches for a savior, but each candidate disappoints. Rather than assuaging his isolation, Mr. Spencer, Sunny, Sally, Horwitz, and Mr. Antolini leave him feeling ever more estranged.

With each encounter, however, Holden overlooks an obvious source of redemption; he never considers saving himself. The oversight appears early in the book when Holden wonders how the ducks in Central Park survive the winter. He theorizes that “some guy” must arrive “in a truck” and take them away. It never occurs to Holden that the ducks survive by their own ingenuity, swimming around the lagoon to keep the encroaching ice at bay.

We never discover whether Holden develops his own method for protecting himself from a wintry, desolate world; however, he seems to lay the foundation for it. As the carousel turns, while everyone around him scrambles to escape a rainstorm, Holden sits peacefully on a bench. Willing to face the deluge alone, Holden depends on his hunting cap to shield him. Goofy looking but functional, the cap is Holden’s token of independence. By relying on it—rather than a nearby overhang—Holden displays his first act of self-reliance.

Catcher’s resolution occurs when the central character accepts—rather than withdraws from— the world. It remains unclear whether at the time he wrote the novel, Salinger considered acceptance a viable remedy for suffering. In his later works Salinger arrives at a different conclusion. Beginning with “Teddy” in 1953, Salinger’s characters find relief from a depressing reality through spiritual transcendence. Holden’s redemption materializes when he chooses to engage the world rather than escaping “out west” or retreating into his mind. Conversely, Teddy McArdle and Seymour Glass escape material pettiness by embracing death and the afterlife.

Most critics think Salinger changed his outlook in the early 1950s, but because he has not discussed the topic publicly, readers must glean what clues they can from Salinger’s fiction. In Catcher, Salinger’s tone is often ironic, particularly toward Holden. For example, in spite of his immaturity, Holden considers himself more enlightened than everyone else; Holden claims to be an atheist but defends Jesus on several occasions; he values innocence but curses, drinks, smokes, and hires a prostitute. The disjunction between Holden’s selfimage and his behavior undermines his authority. As a result, readers must decide whether or not to accept Holden’s example. In contrast with Salinger’s later works Catcher does not tell others how to live.

One of the most recognizable titles in American letters, The Catcher in the Rye has retained remarkable staying power. More than a halfcentury after its initial publication, 250,000 copies sell every year. Despite its popularity, or perhaps because of it, Catcher has weathered its share of controversy. A target of censorship from the beginning, the book’s explicit language and sexual content have roiled social and religious conservatives for decades. Between 1966 and 1975 it was the most frequently banned book in American schools.

Thirty years later, the American Library Association ranked it among the top 10 most challenged books of 2005. The most controversial moment in Catcher’s history occurred on December 8, 1980, when Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. Obsessed with Catcher, which he was carrying at the time of his arrest, Chapman attributed his motive to the novel, which he claimed awakened him to the toxic phoniness Lennon imparted to American youths. Although it innervated censorship advocates, the incident failed to stem Catcher’s popularity. To this day it remains one of the most commonly taught novels in the American educational system, and perhaps the best example of adolescent literature.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. The Catcher in the Rye is often compared to another great American coming-of-age story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After reading Mark Twain’s novel, discuss similarities and differences between the works. Who matures more—Huck or Holden? How does each story benefit from Twain’s and Salinger’s ability to capture his respective era’s youthful vernacular? Both novels are frequent targets of censorship. Why? What do Huck Finn and Catcher have in common that makes some parents bristle when their children are assigned them in class?

2. The Catcher in The Rye has exerted tremendous influence on American literary and popular culture. Salinger is often credited for making adolescence a legitimate topic of serious literature. Since Catcher’s publication, countless novels, plays, and films about youth culture have been produced. As a class, make a list of books and movies that feature adolescent or young adult characters. How many of them have something in common with Catcher?

3. The Catcher in the Rye is often credited with capturing the universal experience of adolescent angst in modern America. Yet, Holden has attended some of the best private schools on the East Coast and his family lives in one of Manhattan’s wealthiest districts. How do socioeconomic factors limit Holden’s understanding of the world? Given these limitations, is it possible to distill a “universal” experience from his story?

4. Holden’s hunting cap and the gold ring Phoebe chases on the carousel are two of the many symbols Salinger employs to convey ideas in The Catcher in the Rye. Make a list of other symbols and discuss their meaning in the context of the novel.