The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by J. D.
Salinger. First published in the United States in 1951, the novel remains controversial to this day for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage angst; it was the thirteenth most frequently challenged book
of the 1990s according to the American Library Association.[1]
The novel has become one of the most important novel literary works of the 20th century, and a common part of high school and college curricula worldwide; it has been translated into almost all of the world's major
languages. [2] Around 250,000 copies are sold each year,
with total sales of more than 60 million.[3]
The novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language
novels from 1923 to the present.[4]
The novel's protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has
become an icon for teenage alienation and angst.[5] Written in the first person,
The Catcher in the Rye follows Holden's experiences in New York City in the days
following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a college preparatory
school.
Protagonist
Holden Caulfield is the protagonist and
narrator of the story. Holden is seventeen when he tells the story, but was sixteen years old
when the events took place.[6] His narration begins with
his expulsion (for academic failure) from a school called Pencey Prep. He is intelligent and sensitive, but Holden narrates in a
cynical and jaded voice. He finds the hypocrisy, phoniness
and ugliness of the world around him almost unbearable.
Holden's siblings
- Allie Caulfield. Allie was Holden's younger brother, who died of leukemia when Holden was thirteen. Allie was
redheaded, mild, considerate, intelligent, and very caring. Allie and Holden were very close. The night of Allie's death, Holden
smashed all the windows in the family garage with his bare fists leading to permanent damage to his hand. Stemming from this
injury, Holden can no longer make a tight fist with his right hand. The only thing that Holden has to remember his lost brother
by is a baseball glove with poetry written on it.
- Phoebe Caulfield. Phoebe is Holden's little sister, whom Holden adores. She is in the fourth grade at the time Holden
leaves Pencey Prep. Holden holds her as a paragon of innocence, and gets furious at the sight of graffiti in her school that
reads "fuck you", for fear that the school children would see it and be somehow tainted. He also thinks that she is too
affectionate, which will also lead to loss of innocence. In some ways, she can be even more mature than he, even criticizing him
for childishness.
- D.B. Caulfield. D.B. is Holden's older brother and lives in Hollywood, where he works as a screen writer. Holden is
disdainful of D.B.'s profession, and calls his brother a "phony", because he claims that his brother is prostituting his works.
Holden professes to despise cinema, but throughout the book he proffers thoughtful and in-depth commentaries on films he has
seen.
Plot summary
The cover of the 1985 Bantam edition of
The Catcher in the Rye.
The Catcher in the Rye is set around the 1950s (see Dating the story, below) 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 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 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 matinée 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.
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 adviser 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.
You find out though that the entire time he's telling you this story he's in a psychiatric facility. He plans to go to a new
school in the fall and is cautiously optimistic about his future.
Writing style
Salinger uses colloquial and street language while allowing the protagonist to narrate
the story. This style, used throughout the novel, refers to the use of seemingly disjointed ideas and episodes used in an
apparently random medley, but in fact in a highly structured way, that is used to illustrate a theme. For example, as Holden sits in a chair in his dorm, minor events (such as picking up a book or
looking at a table) unfold into long discussions about past experiences.
Controversy
The Catcher in the Rye has been shrouded in controversy since its publication.
Reasons for banning have been the use of offensive language, premarital sex, alcohol abuse, and prostitution.
Mark David Chapman, who assassinated John
Lennon, was carrying the book when he was arrested immediately after the murder and referred to it in his statement to
police shortly thereafter.[7] John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was also reported
to have been obsessed with the book.[8]
Thirty years after its first publication in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye was both the most banned book in United States
as well as the second most taught book in public schools. [1]
It was number thirteen on the American Library Association's list of
most frequently challenged books from 1990-2000.[2] It
was one of the ten most challenged books in 2005.[3]
Dating the story
The Catcher in the Rye takes place in the late 1940s, which is about the time the novel was written. World War II was over and the atomic bomb, which was mentioned in
the book, had already been invented. The death of Allie, Holden's younger brother, is given to be July
18, 1946, and it is stated Holden was 13 at that time. It follows, therefore, that the bulk
of the story takes place in approximately December of 1949 and the story's "present" is the summer of 1950. Given that Christmas
fell on a Sunday in 1949, the two days that consume most of the novel are most likely December 18 and 19; if it were one week
later, the second day of Holden's romp would be Christmas, and if it were one week earlier, Pencey would be letting its students
out two full weeks before Christmas.
Attempted film and stage adaptations
Early in his career, J. D. Salinger expressed a willingness to have his work adapted for the screen.[9] However, in 1949, a critically panned film version of his short story
"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was released; renamed My Foolish Heart and taking great liberties with Salinger's story, the film is widely
considered to be among the reasons that Salinger has refused to allow any subsequent movie adaptations of his work.[10] The enduring popularity of The Catcher in the
Rye, however, has resulted in repeated attempts to secure the novel's screen rights.
When The Catcher in the Rye was first released, many offers were made to adapt it for the screen; among them was
Sam Goldwyn, producer of My Foolish
Heart.[10] In a letter written in the
early fifties, Salinger spoke of mounting a play in which he would play the role of Holden Caulfield opposite Margaret O'Brien, and, if he couldn’t play the part himself, to “forget about it." Almost fifty years
later, the writer Joyce Maynard definitively concluded, "The only person who might ever
have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger."[11] Despite this, Salinger told Maynard in the seventies, "Jerry
Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden,"[11] and luminaries ranging from Marlon Brando and
Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire and
Leonardo DiCaprio have since made efforts to make a film of Catcher.[12] In an interview with Premiere magazine, John Cusack commented that his one regret about turning
twenty-one was that he had become too old to play Holden Caulfield. Legendary Oscar-winning writer-director Billy Wilder recounted his abortive
attempts to snare the novel's rights, saying,
| “ |
Of course I read The Catcher in the Rye....Wonderful book. I loved it. I
pursued it. I wanted to make a picture out of it. And then one day a young man came to the office of Leland Hayward, my agent, in New York, and said, 'Please tell Mr. Leland Hayward to lay off. He’s very,
very insensitive.' And he walked out. That was the entire speech. I never saw him. That was J. D. Salinger and that was
Catcher in the Rye.[13] |
” |
In 1961, Salinger denied Elia Kazan permission to direct a stage adaptation of
Catcher for Broadway.[14] More recently, Salinger's agents received bids for the Catcher movie rights from
Harvey Weinstein and Steven
Spielberg,[15] neither of which was even
passed on to Salinger for consideration.
In 2003, the BBC television program The Big Read
featured The Catcher in the Rye, intercutting discussions of the novel with "a series of short films that featured an
actor playing Salinger's adolescent antihero, Holden Caulfield."[14] The show defended its unlicensed adaptation of the novel by claiming to be a "literary review,"
and no major charges were filed.
According to reports in The Guardian newspaper in May 2006, there are rumors that director Terrence Malick has been linked to a possible screen adaptation of Catcher in the Rye by J.D.
Salinger.
See also
-
References
- ^ 100 Most
Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000. American Library Association.
Retrieved on 2007-01-21.
- ^ Magill, Frank N. (1991). "J. D. Salinger", Magill's Survey of American Literature. New York:
Marshall Cavendish Corporation, p. 1803. ISBN 1-85435-437-X.
- ^ According to List of
best-selling books. An earlier article says more than 20 million: Jonathan
Yardley. "J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly", The Washington
Post, 2004-10-19. Retrieved on 2007-01-21.
- ^ "[http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html The Complete List | TIME
Magazine - ALL-TIME 100 Novels]".
- ^ Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Allusions By Elizabeth Webber, Mike
Feinsilber p.105
- ^ The Catcher in the Rye, p. 9
- ^ "Crime Library: The man who shot John Lennon Crimelibrary.com. URL Accessed
June 17 2006.
- ^ "Items Found
In Searches Conducted Of Hinckley's Wallet And Hotel Room Famous American Trials: The John Hinckley Trial 1982
- ^ Hamilton, Ian (1988). In Search of J. D.
Salinger. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-53468-9.
p. 75.
- ^ a b Berg, A. Scott. Goldwyn: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.
ISBN 1-57322-723-4. p. 446.
- ^ a b Maynard, Joyce (1998). At Home in the World. New York:
Picador, p. 93. ISBN 0-312-19556-7.
p. 93.
- ^ News & Features. IFILM: The Internet Movie Guide (2004). Archived from the original on 2004-09-06. Retrieved on 2007-04-05.
- ^ Crowe, Cameron, ed. Conversations with Wilder. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1999. ISBN 0-375-40660-3. p. 299.
- ^ a b McAllister, David. "Will Salinger sue?",
The Guardian, 2003-11-11. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
- ^ PAGE SIX; Inside
Salinger's Own World. The New York Post. (2003-12-04). Retrieved on 2007-01-18.
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