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He appears to envy his dead brother, Allie, to an unwholesome degree. The late, great literary critic Frank Kermode once described The Catcher in the Rye as having a ‘built-in death wish’, and a Freudian analysis of Salinger’s novel might analyse Caulfield’s desire to flee from adult society with its responsibilities and challenges into an earlier childhood stage of innocence as symptomatic of his unconscious desire to return to the womb. His innocence is appealing but also, as innocence is always in danger of being, founded on an overly simplistic view of the world. In his two encounters with his former teachers – whom, suggestively, he seeks out himself, implying that on some level he wants them to set him on the right path to maturity – he views the first as annoying and the second as a possible sex predator. The problem with Holden’s character – which, thanks to Salinger’s masterly control of the teenager’s voice, is engaging and authentic – is that he thinks all adults are somehow lesser than children, and his belief in the primacy of childhood leads him to reduce adults to ‘phonies’ and teachers who don’t understand him. When he visits Phoebe’s school to say goodbye, he is charmingly but also puritanically offended that a swearword has been scrawled on the walls, corrupting the innocence of childhood. And this is the explanation behind the novel’s title: Caulfield’s (largely imaginary) take on a line from a Robert Burns poem, ‘ Comin’ thro’ the Rye’, which prompts him to envision a field of rye near a cliff, where his job would be to catch any children playing in the field and straying too close to the cliff-edge – hence The Catcher in the Rye.īut his idyllic vision of perpetual childhood is founded on a misunderstanding: Phoebe points out to him that he has misremembered (or rather, misheard) the line from Burns’s poem, which actually asks, ‘Gin a body meet a body / Comin thro’ the rye’, rather than if a body catch a body, which is how Caulfield heard the line rendered when he heard the boy singing it earlier that day. Like the Romantic movement – seen in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge – he privileges childhood innocence over the fallen world of adulthood, and seems to think it’s a shame that anyone has to grow up at all. Phoebe works out that Holden is home because he’s been expelled from school, and Holden tells Phoebe his dream of being ‘the catcher in the rye’ (of which more below).Īt the same time, Caulfield is more of a romantic than a realist: he dreams of escaping the modern city in favour of a simple, honest rustic life, a cabin in the woods (a very Walden-inspired dream), and the love of a good woman. Holden gets drunk and goes to Central Park, before going home to see Phoebe, avoiding alerting his parents to the fact he has returned. Once again, Holden ends up annoying someone, this time by taking an unusual level of interest in Carl’s love life. Next, Holden meets Carl Luce, an old schoolfriend, for a drink in a bar. After the play, Holden and Sally go ice skating, but Holden scares Sally away by suggesting they go and live in the woods. It is while he is on his way to meet Sally, while purchasing a record for his sister Phoebe, that Holden hears a boy singing ‘If a body catch a body coming through the rye’. To cheer himself up the next day, Holden phones a girl he knows named Sally Hayes, and, even though he considers her a phoney, they arrange to see a play at the theatre.
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But when the virginal Holden reveals he just wants to talk to her, she leaves, returning with her pimp, who demands more money from him before attacking him, while Sunny takes money out of Holden’s wallet. He visits a nightclub, and, back at his hotel room, arranges for a prostitute named Sunny to come to his room.