J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, evolved over a 10-year period. In 1941, The New Yorker accepted Salinger’s “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” with Holden Caulfield as protagonist; however, because the magazine thought a story about a distraught preparatory schoolboy contemplating running away during Christmas holidays inappropriate while America’s young men were being sent to war, it delayed publication until 1946. The first published story featuring Holden Caulfield was “I’m Crazy” (1945). In it, as well as in “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” are scenes that Salinger included in the novel. Before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger published four other stories in which Holden or characters sharing Holden’s sentiments appear: “The Last Day of the Last Furlough” (1944); “A Boy in France” (1945); “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” (1945); and “The Stranger” (1945). In 1946, Salinger wrote to Ernest Hemingway, mentioning a play about Holden, and in the same year Salinger was reported to have completed a 90-page novelette of The Catcher in the Rye that had been accepted by a publisher. Sensing a need for further revision and detachment from the text, Salinger withdrew it.
The narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, 17-year-old Holden Caulfield, who is haunted by the death of his younger brother, Allie, is recuperating in an institution in the West following an emotional collapse. Holden’s story begins on a Saturday, at Pencey Preparatory School in Agerstown, Pennsylvania, from which he has been expelled, after having previously been dismissed from Wootton School and Elkton Hills. Although Holden had intended to return home to New York for the Christmas holidays and tell his parents about his expulsion, he bolts from his dormitory on Saturday night after a fight with his roommate and goes to New York, where he intends to spend the weekend in a hotel before returning home. Miserable and depressed, he pushes himself to exhaustion, drinking and dancing. He also botches a date in his hotel room with a prostitute named Sunny. Holden’s depression intensifies as he laments the absence of sincerity, spontaneity, sensitivity, and justice. Entertainers, actors, and even those who profess religion have lost touch with the essence or sources that once inspired them, and his brother D. B., a talented fiction writer, has betrayed his talent by becoming a Hollywood screenwriter. The adult world—ugly, dehumanizing, and corrupt—is not one he wishes to join or have his young sister, Phoebe, join. Tellingly, he wonders what happens to the ducks when the park pond freezes. He asks a girlfriend to run away with him, but she refuses.
Dangerously tired, Holden finds the innocence of children regenerative. Watching a little boy singing lyrics from Robert Burns’s “Coming Through the Rye” makes him less depressed, and he feels invigorated when he helps a little girl tighten her skates with her skate key. He cherishes the exhibits in the Museum of Natural History, where nothing changes and everything remains just as it was. Holden has felt obliged to try to protect and save children, but he becomes painfully aware that while museum exhibits do not change, people do, and he cannot prevent that change. Eager to see his sister, Holden returns home. His parents are out. He tells Phoebe that if he had his choice of jobs, he would prefer to stand at the edge of a cliff where children are playing in a field of rye and keep them from falling. When his parents return, Holden goes to the apartment of his favorite English teacher, Mr. Antolini, but it is an unsatisfactory visit. Antolini likewise lacks spontaneity, offering only stale precepts and advice. Holden leaves when Antolini makes a homosexual advance.
Determined to escape New York, Holden leaves a note at Phoebe’s school asking her to meet him. He wants to say goodbye. When Phoebe arrives, carrying her suitcase and intending to follow him, Holden feels renewed responsibility for her and decides not to leave. He takes her to the park, where, while watching her ride a carousel, he becomes enlightened and thoroughly aware that he cannot be the catcher in the rye. In the epilogue, Holden refuses further comment about the past or future, concluding that telling anyone anything causes him to miss everybody.
Early critics saw The Catcher in the Rye as a quest novel in the tradition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Readers differ, however, about the object and resolution of Holden’s quest. Nevertheless, his story is clearly a journey by an adolescent alienated from post–World War II society who seeks truth and, above all, love in a world in which the arts lack freshness, religion lacks God, and sex lacks love. Only in the innocence of children does Holden find relief from his despair; thus, he feels compelled to save children from the world’s corrupting influences. Throughout the novel, rain is associated with Holden’s despair, and sun with respite. Although it rains as he watches his sister Phoebe (also the name of the twin sister of the sun-god Apollo) ride the carousel, Holden, euphoric and enlightened, ceases to associate the rain with doom as he did when it rained in the cemetery where his brother Allie is buried. He chooses instead to sit in the rain, achieving, however temporarily, a moment of peace. In the epilogue, Holden stops his story, maintaining control over his narrative and the parameters of his existence, choosing not to dwell in the past or look to the future, but to live in the comfort of a continuous present.
Despite many excellent reviews of The Catcher in the Rye, the reception of the novel was mixed. Reviewers for journals with religious affiliations often condemned the book, attacking what they saw as its offensive language, and many communities banned it. Yet, by the close of the 20th century, more than 15 million copies of The Catcher in the Rye had been sold, it had been translated into more than 30 languages, and Holden Caulfield had become one of the most memorable characters in American literature.
Sources
Baumbach, Jonathan. “The Saint as a Young Man: A Reappraisal of The Catcher in the Rye.” Modern Language Quarterly 25 (December 1964): 461–472. Reprinted in Holden Caulfield. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York & Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1990.
French, Warren. J. D. Salinger, Revisited. 1963. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Hassan, Ihab. “Rare Quixotic Gesture: The Fiction of J. D. Salinger.” Western Review 21 (Summer 1957): 261–288. Reprinted in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait. Edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.
Salzman, Jack, ed. New Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Whitfield, Stephen J. “Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of The Catcher in the Rye.” New England Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1997): 567–600.