The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

It is dawn on Monday as Holden leaves the Antolinis’ apartment. He sleeps on a bench at the waiting room in Grand Central Station until about 9 a.m. Having second thoughts about Mr. Antolini’s intentions, he wonders if he should have returned and stayed there. Walking up on Fifth Avenue, searching for an inexpensive restaurant in which to eat breakfast, he suddenly feels very anxious. Every time he steps down off the curb to cross a street, he thinks he may just keep falling and disappear. He asks his dead brother, Allie, to help him. Holden is physically and emotionally exhausted, sweating profusely despite the cold. He is near collapse.

In a final, awkward attempt to save himself, Holden decides to go “way out West” and live as a deaf-mute so he won’t have to talk with people. Before leaving, he arranges to say good-bye to Phoebe. While he is with her, he decides to stop running and return home. In a brief final chapter, Holden concludes the story, telling us that he doesn’t know what he thinks about everything that has happened, except that he misses the people he has told us about.

Commentary

Holden’s anxiety as he crosses streets on Fifth Avenue is reminiscent of the feelings that he had on his way to Mr. Spencer’s home near the end of Chapter 1. There, too, he felt that he was disappearing every time he crossed a road. The terror is related to the horror he feels toward mutability and death; it is not surprising that he calls on Allie for support. Allie has crossed over and knows the territory.

Holden’s efforts concerning Phoebe seem ambiguous. He says he wants to see her before he leaves for the West. Because she is his most trusted living link to family, we have to wonder, even at this point, whether he really wants to say good-bye or whether he just longs for home. While delivering a note for Phoebe to the principal’s office of her school, he sees that someone has written “Fuck you” on the wall by the stairs. This enrages him. Holden’s own language is often salty, and Phoebe asked him to stop cursing when he visited her in the apartment, but he finds this word especially abhorrent and does not use it around his sister. It upsets him that innocent children must see such a thing. While waiting for Phoebe at the Museum of Art, he shows two boys an Egyptian tomb and sees the same obscenity on the wall even there. Holden concludes that there is no way to escape the ugliness of the world. Death is never far from his thoughts, and he guesses that someone probably will put the phrase on his tombstone, right under his name and the dates of his birth and death.

Holden’s conversation with Phoebe results in his ultimate decision to go home. At first, she is determined to leave with him, having brought her essentials in one of his old suitcases. He says she cannot go. She refuses to return to school and insists that she does not even care about her role as Benedict Arnold or missing the play. Holden’s decision to return home is suspiciously easy. Supposedly to get Phoebe to stop crying, he says he has changed his mind and is not leaving. He notices, though, that she is not crying at the time he makes this decision.

The touching final scene of Holden’s long flashback, his story, takes place at the carrousel in the park outside of the zoo. The great thing about a carrousel, for Holden, is that it has beauty and music and even motion, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Nothing really changes. However, not everyone wants things to stay the way they are. Symbolically, Phoebe and the other kids want to grab the gold ring hanging just beyond reach on each rotation. If they can grab the gold ring, they can win the prize, whatever that might be. In life, too, it is natural for young people to want to take a risk and try for something beyond what they have. Even Holden, taking an initial step toward maturity or change, concedes that, when kids long to “grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it. . . . If they fall off, they fall off. . . .”

We get the feeling that Holden could stand there and watch Phoebe ride her “big, brown, beat-up-looking old horse” forever, even in the rain. The song the carrousel plays is “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” recalling the natural reaction of tears when smoke gets in people’s eyes. Holden is so happy that he is “damned near bawling.” Phoebe goes round and round, the music plays, and she looks “so damn nice” in her blue coat on that old wooden horse; for a moment, Holden’s world is perfect.

That’s all that Holden wants to tell us. He says that he did go home after being at the zoo with Phoebe. He got sick and ended up in California, but, for once, he doesn’t want to go into the details. He doesn’t know what the future holds, but he misses all the people in his past, even the jerks and bullies. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything,” he concludes. “If you do, you start missing everybody.” Holden wishes that the story would never end. It would be perfect if it just kept going round and round, like that old carrousel.

Glossary