Title: Catcher in the Rye
Author: J.D Salinger

SATURDAY
New York City Goes to New York City for fencing match Leaves the fencing equipment on the subway. Holden buys the red hunting hat.
Pency Prep. Agerstown, Pennsylvania Returns to Pency Stands on Thompson Hill Visits Mr. Spencer to say goodbye. Spencer lectures him. Returns to dorm. Conversations with Ackley and Stradlater Goes into town with Brossard and Ackley Returns to the dorm to write Stradlater's composition on Allie's baseball mitt Stradlater returns from date with Jane Gallagher. Holden has a fist-fight with Stradlater over Jane Gallagher. Holden Wakes up Ackley Decides to leave Pency for New York City Sells his typewriter for twenty dollars Holden leaves Pency. "sleep tight, ya morons!"
OVERNIGHT SATURDAY - SUNDAY Top |
Agerstown to New York City Boards train to New York City Meets Ernest Morrow's mother, becomes Rudolf Schmidt.
New York City Arrives at Penn Station. Calls Sally Hayes takes a taxi. Asks cabbie about where the the Central Park ducks go during the winter. Checks in at the Edmont Hotel. Holden calls Faith Cavendish Goes to the Lavender Room. Meets Marty, Laverne, and Bernice Kregs. Dances with them and they stick him with the check. Leaves the Lavender Room. Wants to call Jane Gallagher but doesn't. Grabs a taxi to Ernie's in Greenwich Village. Asks cabbie (Horowitz) about the Central Park ducks. Holden at Ernie's, which is full of jerks. Meets D.B's ex girlfriend Lillian Simmons Holden walks two miles back to the Edmont hotel. At the hotel he meets the elevator operator, Ernie. Ernie offers to set Holden up with a prostitute for five dollars. Sunny, the prostitute arrives at Holden's room. Holden pays the five dollars just to talk. Sunny leaves. Holden sits in a chair and talks to Allie. Holden goes to bed and tries to pray. Maurice and Sunny are at the door. They want five more dollars. Holden refuses and has a fist-fight with Maurice. They take the money and leave. Holden pretends he has bullets in his gut. Goes to sleep.
SUNDAY
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New York City Holden wakes up after a short sleep. Calls Sally Hayes and makes a date with her for that afternoon. Grabs a taxi to Grand Central Station. Stores his luggage in a locker there. Goes to a nearby "sandwich bar" for breakfast. During breakfast he meets two nuns. After a conversation Holden donates ten dollars to the nuns and tries to pick up their check. Holden leaves the sandwich bar and walks down Broadway. There, he encounters a father, mother, and little boy walking down the street. The little boy is singing "If a body catch a body coming through the rye". Stops into a record store and buys recording of "Little Shirley Beans" for Phoebe. Goes to the theater and buys two tickets for the play "I Know My Love" for his date with Sally Hayes. Goes to Central Park looking for Phoebe. Still looking for Phoebe, Holden walks across the park to the Museum of Natural History. He decides not to go into the museum. Holden takes a taxi to the Biltmore and meets Sally Hayes. They go to the theater to see the play which is starring the Lunts. During intermission Sally meets an old friend, George "something". After the play, Sally and Holden go ice skating at Radio City. They have an argument over sodas. After the date, Holden stops at a drug store to eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted. Tries calling Jane Gallagher but there is no answer. Holden calls Carl Luce. They make plans for drinks that night. Holden goes to the movies at Radio City. Watches the Christmas pagent and the movies he notices a woman crying over the movie, but ignoring her little son. Meets Carl Luce at The Wicker Bar on 54th Street. They have an argument. Holden stays at the bar after Carl Luce leaves. Holden gets very drunk at The Wicker Bar. He calls Sally Hayes and pretends his gut is full of bullets. In the men's room, some flitty guy cautions Holden to go home. Holden wanders around Central Park. He goes to the lagoon. He drops the "Little Shirly Beans" record, breaking it. Decides to sneak home to see Phoebe.
OVERNIGHT SUNDAY - MONDAY Top |
New York City Holden walks home and sneaks into the apartment. He wakes up Phoebe. Holden gives Phoebe the pieces of the broken record. They have a long conversation. Phoebe guesses that Holden's been kicked out of school. Holden tells Phoebe his dream of being the catcher in the rye. He gives Phoebe his hunting hat. Holden calls Mr. Antolini from the apartment. Holden returns to Phoebe's room. He tells her his plans of going out west. She gives him her Christmas money. Holden's parents come home. He avoids them and leaves the apartment. Holden goes to Mr. Antolini's. They have a long conversation. Holden goes to bed on the Antolini's couch. He is woken up by Mr. Antolini petting him.
MONDAY
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New York City Holden walks to Grand Central Station He sleeps on a bench in the Grand Central Station waiting room. Holden wakes up and walks up Fifth Avenue. He feels himself disappearing and prays to Allie. Plans to go out west. Buys paper and pen at a stationary store and writes Phoebe a letter to meet him at the museum at 12:15. Goes to Phoebe's school. Delivers the letter to the office who will give it to Phoebe. Holden sees the graffiti. Holden goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to wait for Phoebe. He meets two young boys there. They visit the mummy exhibition. More graffiti. Phoebe arrives. She is wearing Holden's red hunting hat and is carrying a bag. She tells Holden that she is going with him out west. They argue. Holden follows Phoebe as they enter Central Park. Holden gives in. He will not leave home. Phoebe follows Holden to the Central Park Zoo. Phoebe rides the Central Park Carousel as Holden watches. It begins to pour but Holden will not move out of the rain. Overwhelmed by happiness, he cries.

Holden CaulfieldThe obvious signs that Holden is a troubled and unreliable narrator are manifold: he fails out of four schools; he manifests complete apathy toward his future; he is hospitalized, and visited by a psychoanalyst, for an unspecified complaint; and he is unable to connect with other people. We know of two traumas in his past that clearly have something to do with his emotional state: the death of his brother Allie and the suicide of one of his schoolmates. The most noticeable of Holden’s “peculiarities” is how extremely judgmental he is of almost everything and everybody. He criticizes and philosophizes about people who are boring, people who are insecure, and, above all, people who are “phony.” Holden uses the label “phony” to imply that such people are superficial, his use of the term actually indicates that his own perceptions of other people are superficial. Holden’s personality that deserves comment is his attitude toward sex. Holden is a virgin, but he is very interested in sex, and, in fact, he spends much of the novel trying to lose his virginity. He feels strongly that sex should happen between people who care deeply about and respect one another, and he is upset by the realization that sex can be casual. Stradlater’s date with Jane doesn’t just make him jealous; it infuriates him to think of a girl he knows well having sex with a boy she doesn’t know well.
A brief note about Holden’s name: a “caul” is a membrane that covers the head of a fetus during birth. Thus, the caul in his name may symbolize the blindness of childhood or the inability of the child to see the complexity of the adult world. Holden’s full name might be read as Hold-on Caul-field: he wants to hold on to what he sees as his innocence, which is really his blindness.
Phoebe CaulfieldHolden implies that he is the only noble character in a world of superficial and phony adults, and we must take him at his word. There seems to be a simple dichotomy between the sweet world of childhood innocence, where Holden wants to stay, and the cruel world of shallow adult hypocrisy. Instead of sympathizing with Holden’s refusal to grow up, she becomes angry with him. She is six years younger than her brother, Phoebe understands that growing up is a necessary process; she also understands that Holden’s refusal to mature reveals less about the outside world than it does about himself. Phoebe, then, serves as a guide and surrogate for the audience. Phoebe makes Holden’s picture of childhood—of children romping through a field of rye—seem oversimplified, an idealized fantasy. Phoebe’s character challenges Holden’s view of the world: she is a child, but she does not fit into Holden’s romanticized vision of childlike innocence. She sees that he is a deeply sad, insecure young man who needs love and support. At the end of the book, when she shows up at the museum and demands to come with him, she seems not so much to need Holden as to understand that he needs her.Mr. AntoliniMr. Antolini is the adult who comes closest to reaching Holden. He manages to avoid alienating Holden, and being labeled a “phony,” because he doesn’t behave conventionally. Mr. Antolini’s advice to Holden about why he should apply himself to his studies is also unconventional. He recognizes that Holden is different from other students, and he validates Holden’s suffering and confusion by suggesting that one day they may be worth writing about. He represents education not as a path of conformity but as a means for Holden to develop his unique voice and to find the ideas that are most appropriate to him. When Mr. Antolini touches Holden’s forehead as he sleeps, he may overstep a boundary in his display of concern and affection. However, there is little evidence to suggest that he is making a sexual overture, as Holden thinks, and much evidence that Holden misinterprets his action. he is extremely nervous around possible homosexuals and that he worries about suddenly becoming one. Holden regrets his hasty judgment of Mr. Antolini, but this mistake is very important to him, because he finally starts to question his own practice of making snap judgments about people.
The Painfulness of Growing UpThe Catcher in the Rye is a story of a young character’s growth into maturity. As his thoughts about the Museum of Natural History demonstrate, Holden fears change and is overwhelmed by complexity. He wants everything to be easily understandable and eternally fixed. He is frightened because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in others, and because he can’t understand everything around him. But he refuses to acknowledge this fear, expressing it only in a few instances. Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff.
Phoniness
Its one of Holden’s favorite concepts. It is his catch-all for describing the superficiality, hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world around him. Phoniness, for Holden, stands as an emblem of everything that’s wrong in the world around him and provides an excuse for him to withdraw into his cynical isolation. Though oversimplified, Holden’s observations are not entirely inaccurate. His deceptions are generally pointless and cruel and he notes that he is a compulsive liar. Therefore he is a phony, himself. He’d like us to believe that he isn’t full of phoniness, but its evident that he is just like every person. He’d like to believe that the world is a simple place, and that innocence rest on one side of the fence while superficiality and phoniness rest on the other.

4.The future of Holden is what catches my attention and curiosity to what might happen next. We know that Holden is narrating this story from a rest home. I want to know if Holden's point of views change or if he has changed overall. Towards the end of his story, it is quite evident that Holden had an epiphany that he himself already has grown out of some things and that is completely normal. This happens at the carousel scene when he watches Phoebe ride around but he doesn't join her on the ride because he is too old. He also realizes that he cannot protect Phoebe from everything as well during that scene. He is nervous that Phoebe might fall off and get hurt but as he watches her he realizes that is quite normal too and he cannot protect her from every minor thing that may hurt her because getting hurt and being in pain is inevitable. Because Phoebe represents innocence he in essence has an epiphany that it is impossible to protect innocence. No one can be purely innocent because living life causes you to experience stuff that might shatter the ideal illusion of perfection and innocence such you have when a baby is just first born.
The curiosity of if he is going to back to school and finish it well, now that he had that epiphany. Many readers, including myself want to know what happens to Holden Caufield! It is clear that he had an epiphany but is he going to apply his newly acquired knowledge to himself and to his life? This story is an adventure he had within a three day time period and through that short time period it is easy to say that Holden is very unique and his mind process is quite different from many people. So I'd like to believe his future is bright and full of success. Because of his uniqueness and because he so easily stands out he might become an icon to a few people in his world too that rise to the top.