Catcher in the Rye Essay

Crafting a Catcher in the Rye essay on J.D. Salinger’s famed and beloved novel is an exercise both enjoyable and challenging. The book has done what so few pieces of literature have attempted to do and failed—it has remained relevant to youths everywhere, over half a century after its release. As a result of its celebrated quality, writing an essay on the novel can be daunting. This is because so many of themes and symbols have been picked apart and devoured repeatedly by scholars and critics. However, the better you understand the novel and the major concepts that shape it, the more primed you will be to write the most original and thoughtful essay you are capable of creating.

Holden Caufield, a teenager, opens his story from an institution of some sort (a sanatorium or some other mental health facility). The novel is a recollection of his adventures that had occurred before the last Christmas. At the start of this recollection, Holden explains to the reader that he was expelled from his ritzy private school, Pencey Prep, for failing out of all his courses. On his way out, he runs into Ward Stradlater, his roommate. Stradlater informs Holden that he’s going on a date with an old friend of his, Jane Gallagher. Stradlater also asks Holden to write an essay for him, and Holden complies. When Stradlater returns from his date he says the essay that Holden wrote (about his deceased brother Allie’s baseball mitt) isn’t acceptable. He also won’t tell Holden what exactly went on during his date with Jane—just that they hung out in his borrowed car for several hours. Holden tries to punch him and they scuffle. Holden then bums around the dorm and the loneliness of his situation overwhelms him and he decides to leave for New York a few days early.

However, Holden has to go find a hotel to stay in when he finally arrives in New York, as he can’t go home. Holden claims that his parents do not yet know that he has been expelled, which might be true. Holden has also explained to the reader that “I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” (22).  So it’s also possible that the school called his parents, and they already know about him being expelled. Thus, Holden just wants to avoid going home a bit longer. The reader doesn’t know for sure. Holden then gets room at the Edmont Hotel, and inevitably starts to feel isolated, so he goes down to the Lavender Room, the nightclub in the hotel. He has some awkward interactions there and then hits another nightclub, but then heads out after he sees a woman his older brother D.B., used to date. Upon returning to the hotel, Holden decides to get an escort to come hang out with him for practice in case he ever “gets married” (121), but when she arrives (Sunny), her youth and her oddness make him depressed and he just wants to pay her for conversation. She finds that weird, so she demands to be paid. They haggle over the money with Sunny arguing that her fee is actually double what her pimp quoted him. Later her pimp forces his way in, takes what they believe they are owed. The pimp punches him, after Holden insults him, calling him a “dirty moron” (135).

The next day after giving money to some nuns he meets at breakfast, Holden spends the day with Sally Hayes, a girl he used to date. Sally Hayes is a bit pretentious but very pretty and they catch a movie and go skating. At one point when they’re taking a break from skating, Holden suggests they run away together and live in a cabin in the woods and she sort of dismisses the idea, so he tells her “You give me a royal pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth” (173). This makes her cry and he has to apologize for it. She then refuses to let him take her home. He thinks about phoning Jane again but instead meets up with Carl Luce, a kid he knew at Whooton, which is the school he was presumably thrown out of before Pencey. They just have one drink together at the Wicker Bar as Carl seems annoyed by everything that comes out of Holden’s mouth, even the more neutral things. Holden begs Carl to stay for another drink, but he leaves, saying that he is late.  Holden continues to drink alone.

Holden then wanders around Central Park until the freezing temperature coaxes him back to his parents’ apartment where his younger sister Phoebe is, age 10. Phoebe quickly figures out that he had been kicked out of school again and has a pointed remark for him: she asserts that he doesn’t like anything and then presses him to name one thing that he likes. She then presses him to name something he’d like to be. This is when Holden shares with her his fantasy, inspired by the Robert Burns poem, of being the guy that catches kids who are playing in a field of rye from falling off the edge of the cliff. This fantasy is the inspiration for the novel’s title. Their parents arrive home and Holden sneaks off again.

Holden has already made plans to stay with his old English teacher, Mr. Antolini. Holden has known Mr. Antolini a long time; he was his teacher at Elkton Hills, another private school Holden attended. Antolini is someone who has married a wealthy woman who is older than he, largely in a marriage of presumed convenience. Holden and Antolini smoke and drink and his teacher gives him some good life advice about developing his native talents and finding out more about how his mind works. However, Holden wakes up in the middle of the night to find his teacher crouched on the floor beside his couch, stroking his head. Holden freaks out when that happens, thinking his former teacher is making a pass at him. He flees, passing the rest of the night at Grand Central Station. In the morning, he wonders if he made the correct assessment about Antolini’s intentions.

The next day, he heads straight to Phoebe’s school and leaves a note for her, explaining that he’s going to hitchhike out west. He instructs her to meet him at the museum so he can give her back the money she lent him. Heartbreakingly, she comes to the museum with a suitcase and demands to runaway with him. He can’t agree to that, so instead they go to the park and she rides the carousel. It’s starts to pour and all the other parents and siblings watching their little ones go under the awning. However Holden just sits there and gets soaked, minimally protected by his hunting hat. That’s when the recollected adventure ends and Holden tells us that he’s still under care at an institution of some sort. We can assume it’s a mental health facility as he alludes to being psychoanalyzed. He also tells us he will be starting a new school in the fall. The book ends with Holden’s advice to the reader about remaining emotionally unattached to others.

The novel is rich in motifs and symbolism and this is part of the novel’s success for so many decades. Ultimately The Catcher in the Rye is a novel about loss and grief: we don’t learn until chapter five that Holden’s little brother Allie died of leukemia, but the intense sorrow that Holden continues to feel for him is with us from the first page. We are told that the death of Allie happened on July 18, 1946 when Holden was thirteen. When it happened, Holden broke all the windows in the garage with his fist, doing permanent damage to his hand. This is a clear example of how Holden does not know how to process his emotions. Unable to process them or properly deal with them, he breaks things.

One could argue that this is why he is constantly flunking out of school: he’s using his academic career as something to destroy and as a way of acting out as a result of inner turmoil. He’s also using it as a plea for help. It’s very possible that his parents are emotionally unavailable: on the first page we’re told that his parents are very private people, particularly Holden’s father. This could potentially be a euphemism for emotionally disconnected as well.

Holden is a deeply emotional young man. This might be in part because he’s been disconnected from his feelings of grief for so long they have built up like an avalanche inside of him. He also appears to be exceedingly sensitive and perceptive. The instances of him crying and/or feeling lonely in the novel are numerous. Before he yells goodbye to the empty corridor at Pencey saying, “"Sleep tight, ya morons!" he admits, “I was sort of crying” (68). Holden cries again during the scuffle with Maurice, he cries in the men’s room at the Wicker Bar, he almost cries when he breaks Phoebe’s record, and he cries when Phoebe gives him money. He needs someone, some trusted adult to give him a shoulder to lean on, or to proverbially “catch him.” Much of his fantasy of being the “catcher in the rye” and making sure that those kids don’t go off this “crazy cliff” (224), is a form of projection. That is precisely what he wishes for himself.

When Mr. Antolini gives him a couch for the night and some advice, he alludes to Holden’s emotional issues: “"I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. . .” (224). As the reader, we know that Mr. Antolini was in fact correct about this. Holden did have some sort of breakdown, we can presume, and did end up in a sanatorium, being analyzed and somewhat institutionalized. One can’t help but wonder if anyone had been there to catch him, if his outcome would have been different. The direness of Holden’s situation becomes even more intensified when he wakes up and Antolini is beside the couch stroking Holden’s head. Salinger is careful to make this ambiguous: we don’t know if Antolini is indeed being pervy, or if Holden is so disconnected from his emotions that he can’t identify healthy paternal affection. Any affection from a man might seem perverted to Holden. All we see is the culmination of all these factors and that Holden is on his own again.

Twice in the novel we have instances where Holden gets soaked—once at the bathroom of the Wicker Bar and the other at the end, on the park bench watching Phoebe ride the carousel. Holden never shies away from getting soaked as a normal person might. This is probably because the literal soaking of the external water symbolizes a baring of emotions that he won’t allow himself to feel.

Holden wildly flails throughout the book, attempting to connect with others, but at the same time, he reaches out to people who are “safe” and who cannot provide him with a real connection. He reaches out to Sally Hayes, Carl Luce, Faith Cavendish, Sunny the prostitute—all people he either doesn’t really know or doesn’t really like. These people are safe because he knows it won’t be possible to have a deep connection with them and that if he screws anything up, it won’t really matter. This internal fear of emotional intimacy within Holden is part of the reason why he doesn’t ever call Jane Gallagher. She is someone he genuinely likes. It is true that Holden does end up connecting with Phoebe, his little sister, and he does end up confessing his catcher-fantasy to her. However, their age difference prevents real emotional intimacy as equals from occurring.

Throughout all these adventures and hardships, his hunting hat is with him and it is more than just and expression of individuality. It is an expression of protection not just from the elements but from the outside world, sometimes blocking his vision and covering his exposure to reality. It also separates him, distancing him from others as the weirdo in the hunting cap.

Holden is our hero. We meet him at a very difficult time in his life. He’s been expelled from yet another private school, and it’s the holidays. He still has a tremendous amount of unprocessed grief regarding the death of his younger brother, Allie. Holden is an extremely bright young man and nearly every reader would agree that if he found an area of life that he was passionate about and applied himself, he would probably excel tremendously. Part of Holden’s intelligence is the fact that he notices so much about people. A people say, “the devil is in the details” and Holden notices so much about the small details about other people, as these tiny details do reflect who they are as individuals. For example, the detail he gives us about his roommate Stradlater: “you should've seen the razor he shaved himself with. It was always rusty as hell and full of lather and hairs and crap. He never cleaned it or anything” (35). Holden has a discordant relationship with the outside world, detesting all who strike him as fake or inauthentic. Throughout his adventure in New York, we see him get sort of kicked around and taken advantage of by others, such as by Maurice the pimp, or the women at the Lavender room who stick him with the bill. Other times he’s dismissed as being a kid and told to just go home, or he’s dismissed by people who know him (Carl Luce). It is important to realize that as repeatedly lonely Holden feels, he doesn’t really engage in much self-pity. Maybe his background of affluence prevents that or maybe his intelligence makes him feel like he’s always one step ahead of everyone else.

The young man in his senior year who lives in room next to Holden’s in the Pencey dorm. Everyone refers to him by his last name. He has mossy looking teeth and Holden swears he’s never seen Ackley brush them. He also has a face full of zits. Holden also tells us that Ackley is very peculiar—for example, he’s the one other student who’s not at the game, like Holden. Holden also informs us that Ackley can be a bit nasty, and that’s why he’s not Holden’s favorite person. Holden’s description of Ackley shows us how Holden can be a very manipulative narrator at times because after he tells us all these details about Ackley, the reader is entirely biased against him.

Holden’s roommate at Pencey Prep. A handsome young man who appears to generally excel at prep school. He is more confident and social than Holden. He goes out on a date with Jane Gallagher, a girl Holden knows and likes, and may have rounded the proverbial bases with her. He asks Holden to write his essay for him and Holden does, writing one on his deceased brother’s baseball mitt. Stradlater rejects the essay and Holden and him scuffle. The fight is based on Holden’s resentment of Stradlater’s taking out Jane and his dismissal of the essay written on such a sensitive topic.

She is a young woman around Holden’s age who he used to date. Holden  explains that, “I used to think she was quite intelligent, in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not. It took me years to find it out, in old Sally's case” (137). When the reader finally meets Sally it is hard to imagine that her and Holden were ever together as she does seem to radiate a certain element of the “phony” quality that Holden so despises. For example, she says the word “marvelous” all the time. When they hang out in the book, Holden insults her and makes her cry out of a sense of presumed rejection from her. He had proposed they run away together and she ultimately declined (out of logic and commonsense).

A young man three years older than Holden who attended the Whooton School with him. Holden explains that he didn’t actually like him that much, but was impressed by his intellect. They meet up for a drink at the Wicker Bar, and Holden is hoping for some intellectual conversation. Based on their hang, it’s surprising that Carl meets up with Holden at all, as he seems annoyed by and dismissive of everything that Holden says. Carl ends up leaving after one drink, even though Holden begs him to stay, saying he’s terribly lonely.

Phoebe is Holden’s ten-year old kid sister. Holden repeatedly tells us how pretty and smart his little sister is, and that she has been this way her entire life. We soon see that this is true, when she calls Holden out on some of his issues, accusing him of not liking anything and not having any direction in life. Her dialogue with Holden demonstrates that she is exceedingly intelligent for her age, and her worries about Holden signify how much she understands his the situation.

He is the most inscrutable character in Holden’s world. He was a teacher of Holden’s at Elkton Hills (another prep school Holden was kicked out of). We are told that he’s a young guy, just a few years older than Holden’s older brother D.B. Antolini is married to a wealthy, much older woman. At first Antolini seems like a winning human being in Holden’s life. To vouch for his character, Holden tells us that when a student jumped out the window, Antolini felt his pulse and put his coat over the child, and carried him to the infirmary. Antolini lets Holden crash on his couch, and gives him some fantastic advice for the future. However, when Holden awakens, he finds Antolini sitting on the floor next to the couch, stroking his head. It’s a strange move, one that strikes Holden as pervy. Holden makes an excuse to leave and Antolini shifts the weirdness of the overall situation onto Holden, referring to him repeatedly as “a very very strange boy” (250). Upon reflection, the reader sees that there were signs of Antolini perhaps being attracted to Holden during their conversation (he refers to Holden as handsome, refers to his long legs, asks him about how all the girls were in his life, and does not offer him pajamas or anything to sleep in—so Holden would presumably have to sleep in his underwear). Of course, Holden later wonders if he misread everything and if he should go back to his apartment and say something. The reader is left torn over this character.

He is Holden’s older brother who is a talented writer. However, he has decided to write for Hollywood as a screenwriter, a move that Holden detests, connecting it with prostitution. D.B. visits Holden in the institutionalized care that he is in, and is apparently going to drive him home in his new jaguar when Holden is released.

Jane is a phantom that exists throughout the novel. She’s a girl that used to be Holden’s neighbor a few summers ago. She’s clearly someone who matters a tremendous amount to him, as he has nothing bad to say about her. We are told she used to be a very disciplined ballet dancer and that when they played checkers, she’d keep all her kings in a row in the back and never use them. Holden toys with the idea of giving her a call numerous times throughout the novel, but never does, to our knowledge. One can conclude that Holden’s inability to process emotions, his active defense mechanisms, and his fear of intimacy all prevent him from reaching out to Jane.

Allie is perhaps the most important character in the novel, next to Holden. Allie died from leukemia when he was eleven and Holden was thirteen. Holden makes Allie sound like an angel—that he was the smartest, nicest kid ever. Holden tells us, “His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap. They really meant it” (50). The death of Allie is the wound that continues to fester inside of Holden and the swirling unchecked and unreckoned with emotions are what motivate so many of Holden’s actions and mania.

Since Holden is such a witty narrator, the novel is filled with quotable lines. The following collection give the best inventory of Holden’s mental and emotional state at the time of his recollection.

“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road” (8).

“Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it” (14).

“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible” (22).

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though” (25).

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone” (157).

“I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away” (200).

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be” (224).