The catcher in the rye online
His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. . . . He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. He wrote them on it so that he’d have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder’s mitt. So what I did, I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt. I’m not too crazy about describing rooms and houses anyway. The thing was, I couldn’t think of a room or a house or anything to describe the way Stradlater said he had to have. He wanted you to think that the only reason he was lousy at writing compositions was because he stuck all the commas in the wrong place. . . . I mean don’t stick all the commas and stuff in the right place.” The implication that all there is to writing a composition is a sense of direction about commas also gives Holden “a royal pain.” “I mean,” he explains, “if you’re good at writing compositions and somebody starts talking about commas. Just as long as it’s as descriptive as hell. . . . While Stradlater is shaving before going to meet Jane, he asks Holden to write a classroom composition for him. He keeps calling up a girl named Sally Hayes, whose manifest phoniness gives him “a royal pain,” but he writes that off as the overhead of sex. Or perhaps he wishes to keep his memory of Jane inviolate and consecrated, like his memory of Allie perhaps he is afraid of finding her innocence tarnished-not in a sexual sense, because eventually he is sure that Stradlater didn’t “get to first base with her,” but simply of finding her no longer what she was, possibly finding that she has become, in short, a phony. He is always about to but doesn’t, because he’s never “in the mood.” (“You really have to be in the mood for that stuff.”) Perhaps he means that circumstances and his feelings are always too chaotic at the particular moment-that he wants to appear before Jane when everything is in order and he is in control of himself. It is characteristic of Holden that although he is crazy about Jane, always thinking of her, always wanting to call her up, he never does call her up. The hero and heroine of this novel, Holden’s dead brother Allie and Jane Gallagher, never appear in it, but as they are always in Holden’s consciousness, together with his sister Phoebe-these three constitute his emotional frame of reference-the reader knows them better, finally, than the characters Holden encounters, who are, except for Phoebe, marginal. On Holden’s last night at school, a Saturday night, he is in a frenzy of jealousy because Stradlater has dated up Jane Gallagher, with whom Holden is in love. Stradlater, Holden’s roommate, is handsome, gross, and a successful amorist. The book covers Holden’s last day at Pencey, a fashionable prep school, from which he has flunked out, and the following two days, which he spends in hiding in New York City. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could both be blindfolded or something.”) He is also worried by the lack of an acute sense of ownership he didn’t really care about losing the gloves in the first place. (“I can’t stand looking at the other guy’s face, is my trouble. He is scared by what he imagines the culprit’s face will look like while his jaw is being demolished. When another boy steals his gloves, Holden can’t just go up to the boy’s room, accuse him of stealing his gloves, and hit him in the jaw. Grown men sometimes find the emblazoned obscenities of life too much for them, and leave this world indecorously, so the fact that a sixteen-year-old boy is overwhelmed should not be surprising. For example, he is driven frantic by a scrawled obscenity some vandal has chalked on the wall of his ten-year-old sister Phoebe’s school. I’m too worried to go.”) He is moved to pity unconscionably often. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. (“When I really worry about something, I don’t just fool around. He is driven crazy by “phoniness,” a heading under which he loosely lumps not only insincerity but snobbery, injustice, callousness to the tears in things, and a lot more. He is inexorably self-critical at various times, he refers to himself as yellow, as a terrible liar, a madman, a moron. He is hypersensitive and hyper-imaginative (perhaps these are synonymous). Holden Caulfield is made to tell his own story, in his own strange idiom. Salinger’s brilliant, funny, meaningful novel is written in the first person.