The Catcher in the Rye: “I’d just be the catcher in the rye…”

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this bid 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.” (Salinger pg. 173)

This quote was one of the most meaningful ones of all. At first I didn’t know what it meant, but as I thought about it, the meaning became clear. Holden, during this book, is struggling with a major inner conflict. Maturity and his climb to adulthood. He’s around seventeen years old, and he’s coming to a point in his life where he is going to have to become an adult. Unfortunately, he’s having a terrible time with it, and he says, “I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen.”( Salinger pg. 9) He then talks about how he has graying hair, since he was a kid,  and how his dad tells him he acts like he’s twelve. “I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am—I really do—but people never notice it. Peole never notice anything.” (Salinger pg.9) The mention of his gray hair is what really tells the reader that he’s gone through a lot of things that a young kid should never have to go though. We later find out his brother Allie died and Holden had to be sent to a place because he broke all the windows in his garage out of anger and sadness. Holden had the majority of his childhood robbed from him when he had to go through the death of his brother. That is why this quote about the catcher in the rye means a lot. He’s talking about keeping little children from going over the cliff, and the cliff is adulthood and the point in which innocence doesn’t exist anymore. Holden wants to preserve child innocence, and I think he inwardly wishes someone would have done that for him. This whole story is about Holden losing all his innocence, and this quote describes what he wishes would have happened to him. He wants to correct that mistake and keep other children from making it, and ‘going over the edge of the cliff’.

            Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Print.