The Catcher in the Rye

sparknotes.com/lit/catcher/summary/

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

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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.

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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 homosexuals 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 homosexual 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.

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