What You Notice in The Catcher in the Rye When You Read It as an Adult

The detail worth watching for when you reread The Catcher in the Rye is a baseball glove. Holden Caulfield is supposed to write a description for his roommate, and he chooses his dead brother’s mitt. Allie wrote poems on it so he’d have something to read in the outfield. It’s a small, funny detail about a kid who got bored playing baseball. It also explains why Holden, who spends so much of the book making people sound interchangeable, can remember his brother with such care.

As a teenager, you might notice how good Holden is at spotting hypocrisy. As an adult, you may pay more attention to what happens right after he spots it. He makes a joke, changes the subject, or leaves. Then, sooner or later, he looks for someone else to talk to. On a reread, the distance between how badly he wants company and how hard he makes it to keep him company can be the most recognizable thing about him.

Spoilers follow, including the ending.

Allie’s glove changes how you hear Holden’s voice

Stradlater wants Holden to write about a room or a house for his composition. Holden can’t think of one he wants to describe, so he writes about Allie’s glove. Stradlater complains that the assignment was supposed to be about something else. Holden tears up the composition.

There’s a small disaster in that exchange. Holden hands over a memory of someone he loved, and Stradlater reads it as homework he can’t use. Stradlater has no way of knowing what Holden wants him to understand. Holden hasn’t told him. The reader gets the story of Allie and the glove because Holden can tell it to us later, with the other boy out of the room.

Allie died of leukemia. Holden tells us that on the night his brother died he broke the garage windows with his fist. Late in the book, frightened that he might disappear as he crosses the street, he asks Allie to help him get to the other side. The glove and the street crossings make an odd pair. In one scene Holden keeps his brother present by remembering what he did when he was bored. In the other he talks to him as if he can still get him safely across an avenue. Once you’ve noticed how naturally Holden turns to Allie, his idea of saving children sounds less like a career fantasy and more like a job he wishes somebody could have done.

Holden makes loneliness look like a busy social life

Holden packs a surprising number of people into his few days in New York. He calls Sally Hayes, meets Carl Luce for a drink, talks with cabdrivers, and has breakfast near two nuns. A bare itinerary might make him sound like someone who knows exactly how to spend a weekend by himself.

Watch how quickly he asks certain people for more than they know he needs. During his date with Sally, he proposes they run away together. She points out the practical problems, and he insults her. As a younger reader, you might be caught up in the thrill of the plan. On a reread, it’s easier to hear the pressure he puts on Sally. She went out with him for a show and skating. Suddenly he wants her to decide what to do with the rest of her life.

The nuns offer a different kind of encounter. Holden talks about Romeo and Juliet with one of them and gives them ten dollars for their collection. The conversation has somewhere to go because he’s interested in what they have to say. There’s nothing much at stake for anybody. It’s one of the quieter pleasures of the book to discover how easy Holden can be to spend time with under those conditions.

The museum already contains the argument for rereading the book

Holden loves the displays at the Museum of Natural History because he knows what he’ll find every time. The figures stay in the same positions. The person who visits them keeps changing.

What makes this passage so good is the scale of the changes he imagines. Maybe you’ve heard your parents fight. Maybe you have a different partner in line on the school trip. Maybe you’re wearing an overcoat. Holden understands that the world can look different even when the thing you’re looking at is exactly where you left it. He can explain this with great tenderness when the subject is a museum. He has a harder time accepting it when the subject is Phoebe.

The passage also gets at why rereading the novel can be so disorienting. You may remember the insults almost word for word and find yourself waiting for a scene you barely registered the first time. The first time through, you might wonder whether Holden will get away from everybody. Years later, you might wonder who will notice that he’s gone.

Phoebe has plans of her own

When Holden tells Phoebe about his fantasy of catching children before they run off a cliff, she corrects his version of the Robert Burns line that inspired it. He has remembered a line about meeting someone as a line about catching someone. The mistake gives him a part to play. He can stand in one place and know what he’s supposed to do whenever a child comes near.

Phoebe makes that role harder to imagine. When Holden plans to leave, she turns up with a suitcase because she intends to go with him. He can see immediately why she shouldn’t leave school and home behind. Seeing his idea in her hands makes it harder to pretend that his own departure would be a clean break.

Then she gets on the carousel and reaches for the gold ring. Holden is afraid she’ll fall, and he lets her reach. He stays there watching even when it starts to rain. The contrast with his fantasy is in what he does with his fear. In the rye field, his fear would give him a reason to step in every time. At the carousel, he can be scared for Phoebe and still give her room to try.

The last page makes room for people Holden wrote off

After the carousel, Holden tells us very little about what happened next. He does admit that he misses the people he’s been telling us about, even some he seemed glad to get away from. That admission complicates all the judgments he made with such certainty earlier in the book. It also makes sense of why he remembers so many of those people in the first place.

The Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite classics, and the museum and the carousel are the two scenes I’d put side by side for anyone coming back to it. Both offer Holden something familiar that repeats. At the museum he’s drawn to a world that holds still. At the carousel the ride keeps circling, but what he cares about is what Phoebe might do on the next turn.

Related reading: Our original review of The Catcher in the Rye.

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Ready to reread it? Find J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in paperback on Amazon.