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Jerome D. Salinger -The Catcher in the rye
(Der Fänger im Roggen)

Plot Summary

Holden Caulfield is a prep school student who has trouble with every school
he has attended: first the Whooton School, then Elkton Hills, and now Pencey.
As the novel begins, Holdon is in a psychiatric hospital in California and
prepares to tell his story to a psychoanalyst at that institution. But the
analyst is also the reader, and Holden addresses each person who reads the
novel in a very intimate manner.
His story takes place in a short period of time - several days. He beginns
with his expulsion from the Pencey School where he has flunked four out of
five subjects. He does not like the teachers, nor does he enjoy the students:
they are snobby of wealthy families, and have an air of phoniness about them.
Holden is the manager of the Pencey fencing team. The team goes into New
York City for a match, but Holden loses their foils in the subway so they
are unable to compete. This means that they must return to Pennsylvania
unfulfilled, and they are angry with Holden. When they arrive back on campus,
there is a football game in progress. Instead of attending it with the rest
of the school, Holden pays a last visit to a teacher whom he respects. Mr.
Spencer lectures him on his conduct, but bids him a fond farewell.
That evening, the boy in the next room to Holden;s in the dormitory
comes over to visit him. His name is Ackley and he is terrific bore. They
talked about Pencey, and Holden believes that it is a school of phonies.
Later, Holden;s roommate Stradlater comes in. He is a sexy, virile athlete
who asks Holden to write a composition for one of his courses. He has a date
with Jane Gallagher that evening and does not have time to write it himself.
Holden is very depressed about his roommate´s date. Jane Gallagher was
one of Holden;s friends and he does not want her to be taken advantage
of by Stradlater. Throughout the novel, Jane will represent Holden;s
ideal of purity and unspoiled female compansionship, but he is unable to
see or have contact with her.
Holden writes Stradlater;s composition on a subject very dear to him:
his brother Allie;s baseball mitt. Holden describes his younger brother;
who died of leukemia, with great love.
Allie was the kind of kid who wrote verses of poetry on his baseball mitt
so that he could entertain himself in the field when no one was at bat. Holden
is moved by this and describes it in the essay. When Stradlater returns from
his date, he is angered by Holden;s choice of topics and Holden is wooried
about Stradlater;s treatment of Jane. The two fight and Holden is pushed
to the floor with a bloody nose.
Holden decides to leave Pencey school closes for Christmas. He takes the
train to his home in New York but cannot go directly to his parents
apartment: they are not expecting him home until Wednesday and, since the
know nothing of his expulsion from Pencey, he prefers that they find it out
in his absence. So he goes to a cheap hotel, the Edmont, and he enters a
dreary marathon of sordid events which ultimately bring his depression to
a head. From this point until the end of the novel, Holden relates what happens
to him before he is admitted to the mental hospital.
At the Edmont, he is offered a prostitute by the shady elevator man. The
woman comes to Holdens room but he is too nervous and depressed to
have sex, so he eventually leaves. Later, the man returns with the prostitute
and beats Holden up in order to get more money from him.
The next day, Holden calls up Sally Hayes, a sometime friend, and makes a
theater date for that afternoon. In the meantime, he walks down Broadway
looking for a special record for his sister Phoebe, whom he adores. He overhears
a little boy walking by the curb and singing a verse from a Robert Burns
poem: "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." This makes Holden
happy and he decides, later on, that his role in life is to help innocent
children resist the vulgarity of adult civilisation. He seems himself as
someone who will catch them before they fall over the cliff of evil, and
this explains the novels title; he will be the catcher in the rye.
Holden and Sally attend the theater. He dislikes the phoniness of actors
and of the know-it-all spectators. Afterwards Holden and Sally go skating
and Holden suggests they go away together for a couple of weeks. Sally thinks
it is an impractical idea, they fight and Holden leaves.
He calls up Carl Luce, an arrogant school friend, and the two meet for a
drink. It proves to be another unsatisfactory encounter for Holden. Luce
talks condescendingly to Holden and quickly abandons him in the bar. Holden
gets very drunk, walks to Central park, drops the record he bought for Phoebe
and is saddened when it smashes into pieces. He is alone and frightened in
the park, and feels a need to see his sister.
He decides to go and see Phoebe, taking the chance that his parents might
see him. They do not. But after an emotionally charged session with Phoebe,
where they express their love for one another, he leaves to spend the evening
in the apartment of Mr. Antolini, a former English teacher. While there,
he is awakened from his sleep by Antolini;s hand on his head. Alarmed
by what he perceives to be a homosexual advance, Holden leaves nervously
in the middle of the night.
He goes to Grand Central Station, sleeps badly for a couple of hours, then
gets the idea to hitch-hike out West and find a job. He wants to see Phoebe
one last time and arranges to meet her at the Metropolitian Museum of Art.
She arrives with her suitcase, wanting desperately to accompany her brother,
but he refused and they have an argument. Finally, they reconcile and Holden
agrees to go home to their parents apartment with her - but not before
he gets drenched in a rainstorm and becomes ill.
The novel ends with a brief concluding chapter in which Holden mentions his
plans to go back to school in September. He is not sure whether he will be
successful there or not, but knows that it is never possible to predict the
future.

The main characters

Holden Caulfield

Holden is the sixteen-year-old son of wealthy parents who live near Central
Park in New York City. He is telling the story from a rest home or hospital
near Hollywood. Holden has just flunked out of his third prep school, an
event he tries without success to feel badly about. Because of his age, school
should be the most impotant institution in his life, but Holden has no use
for it. Although he is intelligent and fairly well read, school represents
repression to him; it stands for the "phony" standarts and values he hates.
Holden is sensitive, probably too sensitive for his own good, and he suffers
from an almost uncontrollable urge to protect people he sees as vulnerable.
He is attracted to the weak and the frail, and he "feels sorry for" losers
of all kinds, even those who cause him pain, discomfort, or trouble. But
the main focus of Holden;s protective instinct is children, whom he
sees as symbols of goodness and innocent, and whom he like to shield against
corruption.
One sign of corruption in Holden;s worldview is the process of growing
up, since it removes us from the perfect innocent of childhood. He has a
day-dream about children who never grow up , who remain in that perfect world
forever, and his own problems of facing the real world are linked to that
daydream.
Holden is essentially a loner, but not because he dislikes people. His loneliness
arises from the fact that no one seems to share his view of the world, no
one understands what;s going on in his head. His poor academic record
is one indication of his failure to deal with this problems, a problem that
builds to a climax in the course of the novel.

Phoebe Caulfield

Phoebe is Holden;s ten-year-old sister, bright and articulate girl who
sometimes talks to Holden as though she were older than he. She;s one
of the few people he feels great affection for, and he talks about her with
obvious delight. She;s the personification of Holden;s idealized
view of childhood, and he seems actually to posses all the wonderful qualities
Holden ascribes to her. The problem for Holden is that she;s a real
person, not an idealization, and she;s already showing signs of the
process of growing up. Phoebe appears in person very late in the book, but
she plays a central role in Holden;s thoughts, and has much influence
on what happens to him at the end of the novel.

Theme

It is a comment on the insensitivity of modern society. Holden is a hero
who stands against the false standarts and hypocrisy that almost all others
accept. As much as he would like to accept the world and be comfortable like
almost everyone else, he can;t pretend that his society is worthwile.

Form and structure

Holden tells his story in a series of flashbacks, or digressions. There is
nothing logical or orderly about the way a person´s memory works, and
so Holden;s mind drift in and out of the past, dwelling on moments that
often seem to bear little relationship to each other. Like a patient on a
psychatrist;s couch, he let his mind take him where it will. One memory
- one emotion - triggers another, and it;s up to me as reader to try
to discover the relationship between them. While reading it;s easy to
forget that Holden is telling the story from a hospital bed, and that he;s
there because of the events he tells about in the book. This hospital (or
rest home) setting is the overall structure on which the story is built.
Within that structure the story itself divides neatly into three parts. The
first part has Holdon at Pencey, preparing to leave on his own before he;s
formally expelled. The second part of the book, which begins with Chapter
9, has Holden trying to find someone he can talk honestly with, someone he
can make contact with, someone who will understand what;s bothering
him. The reader learn about Phoebe. By the end of this section, in Chapter
20, Holden is more alone than ever before, he;s close to hysteria, and
he;s thinking about what a relief death would be.
When Holden decides to go home and visit Phoebe, the novel enters the third
and final section. In this section Holden has to face some ugly truths that
he;s been trying hard to avoid - truths about his sister, about childhood
innocence, and about himself.
When the third section reaches climax in Chapter 25 we;re abruptly brought
back to the outside structure of the novel, the bed from which Holden is
speaking. It;s in this outside structure, from a vantage point several
months and several thousand miles away, that Holden makes his final comments
on the whole matter.

Language and Style

Salinger was trying to capture the speech patterns of a typical teenager
of the 1950s. Holden;s language is trite, imprecise, and imitative because
of his own lack of self-definition, and because of his inability to communicate
with others. His use of the word "really" and his repetition of the expression,
"if you want to know the truth", reflect his drive to dissociate himself
from the so-called phonies, who use language to hide from their feelings.
(digressions, vulgarismen like "hell, ass, bastard", obscenity and slang)