The Catcher in the Rye - Timeline

When he met up with Sally, Holden was so excited. He got to the meeting place early and eagerly awaited her arrival. Instead of going to see a movie, as previously planned, they went ice skating. Sally and Holden have a wonderful time ice skating. After skating, and during dinner, Holden has this peculiar idea about moving away with Sally to Massachusetts or Vermont. She firmly rejects the idea. “Why not, why the hell not?” says Holden (132). Holden has a strong negative reaction to Sally, asking her why she won’t go with him. Holden acted in an irrational manner. After they argue Sally leaves him abruptly. Holden’s unrealistic request and overreaction to Sally’s response was induced by his depression.

Just before leaving he meets Lillian Simmons who is one of his brother D.B’s, ex’s. She tried striking up a conversation with Holden but the only reason why she talked to Holden is to find out how his brother was doing not in how Holden was doing himself. She even goes as far to ask Holden to pass on a message to his brother if he ever gets the chance. After she goes to leave, her date and Holden say that they were glad to have met each other, which was a phony thing to do as Holden wasn’t glad at all to have met him.

Holden’s date with Sally Hayes exhibited his difficulty at cooperating with others. At first he gives us a dire impression of Sally, “I wasn’t too crazy about her, but I’d known her for years.” (p. 105) Later, he wants to marry Sally and says he is in love with her. The biggest mystery of all when it comes to women is with Jane Gallagher. Constantly mentioning Jane, Holden recalls playing checkers with her before he got sent to boarding school. When his roommate, Stradlater, has a date with Jane, Holden asks him a peculiar question, “Did you ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row?” (p. 42) Holden, jealous of Stradlater’s date with Jane, longs to see Jane but never has the courage to call her. Interactions with other people especially women perplex and overwhelm Holden. He therefore resorts to isolation, illustrating a characteristic of his mental state.

In the hotel lobby, Holden thinks about Jane and their childhood together.Their families had summer homes next to each other. Holden remembers a time where Jane’s alcoholic stepdad asked her for some cigs’ and she began to cry. Holden and Jane used to hold hands, he states that when this happened he was truly happy. Also, Jane was the first person Holden showed Allie baseball glove too. These thoughts depress Holden and he heads out and takes a cab out to a nightclub in Greenwich Village.

The novel begins with sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield who is recounting two days back in December in the form of a long flashback. Holden has been expelled numerous times, his most recent, Pencey Prep. After getting into a fight with his roommate, Stradlater, Holden leaves school before he must return home on Wednesday to confront his family of his expulsion. Once he enters the train heading to New York he meets the mother of one his classmates from Pencey. Holden then misleads his classmates mother into believing that her son is popular among the students who attend Pencey. When he arrives in New York he encounters strangers dancing in a hotel, a prostitute, nuns, an old girlfriend, and his younger sister Phoebe. While Holden’s journey continues

After the excursion, Mal went off to look for a bridge game, and Ackley sits on Holden’s bed squeezing pimples and making up stories about a girl he had sex with during the summer before. Holden gets him to leave by working on the English assignment for Stradlater. Stradlater said composition was supposed to be an easy description of a room, a house, something on point. But Holden cannot think of anything to say about a house or a room. So he writes about a baseball glove that his brother Allie used to copy poems by using a green

3. Who is the first person Holden calls? Why do you suppose he doesn’t arrange to meet her the next day as she suggests? A prostitute and not to sure doesn’t want to wait that long perhaps

As Holden and Sally’s date continues on they end up sitting down and having a conversation where Holden reveals one of his illusions to her. In Holden’s crazy mind he has come up with a plan, that seems perfect to him, to run away with Sally and go live their life somewhere far away from all

He experiences several moments of panic during his weekend in the city, and these can be traced back to the trauma he felt after Allie’s death. When Holden takes Sally Hayes ice-skating, he goes into a nervous rant, asking her if she ever got “fed up” as in did she ever “get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless she did something” (Salinger 130). Sally doesn’t respond in the way Holden wants, so eventually he loses his temper and upsets her. This anxiety attack was rage induced, and made him erupt at Sally. He reacts differently to his anxiety when he visits Phoebe. Phoebe offers to give him her Christmas money, and Holden “all of a sudden” starts to cry (Salinger 179). He feels overcome with emotions towards Phoebe and himself. Holden’s breakdown in this moving scene signals his growing, frightening awareness of the other sort of intimacy (Bryan 46). Holden comes to the realization that his relationship with Phoebe is the most intimate that he has with anyone. He leaves the house immediately after his breakdown. The anxiety attacks that Holden experiences come at emotional times and make him unable to control his actions. His emotions always bring him back to Allie, and the trauma surrounding Allie causes him to

Once settled into the hotel room, Holden decides to change his shirt and visit the nightclub. Although, he was ready to leave he still had the urge to call up his younger sister, Phoebe. Speaking highly of her, he fights the urge and makes his way down to the Lavender Room. Upon arrival, Holden struggles to persuade the waiter in serving him an alcoholic beverage, although he claims his physical appearance frequently mistakens him for being older. Afterwards, Holden moves towards a group of ladies and decides to dance with them. Once he found how depressing it was knowing that these ladies were madly obsessed with celebrities he

Holden hates those magazines that the steward sells on the train. Holden cites, "I can usually even read one of those dumb stories in a magazine without puking. You know. One of those stories with a lot of phony, lean-jawed guys named David in it, and a lot of phony girls named Linda or Marcia that are always lighting all the goddam Davids' pipes for them" (53). Holden cannot stand that all the stupid same old stories. The ones where there is always a hero and saves someone that is in trouble. After that Holden felt a little down so he decided to pass the time. Holden knows this girl named Sally Hayes. They used to send a lot of time together when they were younger. Holden is bored and decides to give her a call. He calls her and her father answers and then gives the phone to Sally. Sally Hayes picked up the phone and asks, "yes--who is this?" Holden goes on to state, "she was quite a little phony. I'd already told her father who it was" (106). Holden cannot believe that she knows who is calling but asks for no reason. Sally is just trying to play a stupid game that Holden would rather not want to play at any time.

Here, Holden desperately wants to escape the phony, corrupt world, so he proclaims his love to her, and asks her to runaway with him. She tells him that he is crazy and leaves him.

Holden decides to ride a bus to Agerstown, eat hamburgers and watch a movie with Mal. Holden invites Ackley because Ackley doesn’t do anything during Saturday nights and this shows that Holden is kindhearted and sympathetic. However, what they actually did was eat hamburgers and played a couple of rounds pinball.

Holden also loses his innocence when he accepts the inevitability of growing up. When he visits the Natural History Museum, Holden notes that the exhibits

“I don’t like any shows very much, if you want to know the truth. They’re not as bad as movies, but they’re certainly nothing to rave about. In the first place, I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do. Some of the good ones do, in a very slight way, but not in a way that’s fun to watch. And if any actor’s good, you can always tell he knows he’s good, and that spoils it…If an actor acts it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he’s going to do something phony every minute.” He finds the theater phony because instead of demonstrating reality as it is, the emphasis is placed on polishing it theatrically. Holden feels anger towards his brother because “he’s out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute.” He considered that D.B. was selling himself to Hollywood, which is why he called D.B. a prostitute. He considers the movies phony and hates them so much that “… I don’t think I could ever do it with somebody that sits in a stupid movie all day long” when Sunny the prostitute was in his room. When he dances with Bernice Crabs/Krebs, he considers her a moron partially because she was on the lookout for actors at the bar because she had seen an actor the previous night. Also, it depressed him that they were planning on waking up early the next day to see the first show at Radio City Music Hall. Holden’s criticism towards the phony things in society is the most important part of his personality because it shows that