The book tells the story of Holden Caulifield. A 17 year old boy that goes to a fancy boarding school in Pennsylvania. Or at least he did. After failing his classes he is told that following the Christmas holidays he will be expelled. Instead of going home to his parents. He gets a local hotel room and roams the city looking for mature and intelligent conversations with fellow adults. Being a good liar and looking much older than he is, he is a convincing figure. He enjoys good literature and despises the “phony” people who put on a front to appear a certain way. He tries hard throughout the book not only to avoid being a phony, but to avoid interacting with them. The book centres around his experiences in the City as he searches for a good conversation. He basically bounces from boring person to boring person in search of a good life story.
Highlights
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
“He was the most boring guy I ever listened to.”
“I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I’d care too much.”
“Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.”
“You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring”
“You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were.”
“and I thought he might want to have dinner with me somewhere and have a slightly intellectual conversation.”
“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
“lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most.”
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”