Catcher - Plot Events
This is the name of the prep school Holden is expelled from at the start of the novel.
What is Pencey Prep?
This is the name of Holden's ten-year-old younger sister.
Who is Phoebe?
This item of clothing, worn backwards, represents Holden's individuality.
What is the red hunting hat?
This is the word Holden repeatedly uses to describe people or things he considers fake or insincere.
What is "phony"?
Emerson's essay argues that true selfhood requires this, rather than following the crowd.
What is self-reliance?
This is the title of Emerson's essay, excerpted for this unit.
What is "Self-Reliance"?
This is the sport Holden was the "manager" of, whose equipment he lost on the subway.
What is fencing?
This is Holden's roommate at Pencey, whom he fights after a date with Jane Gallagher.
Who is Stradlater?
These animals are the subject of Holden's repeated, anxious question to New York cab drivers.
What are the ducks (in the Central Park lagoon)?
This event, occurring when Holden was thirteen, is a major source of his unprocessed grief throughout the novel.
What is Allie's death?
This sociologist argues that Americans are actually more conformist than they believe themselves to be.
Who is Claude Fischer?
This newspaper originally published Fischer's "Sweet Land of . . . Conformity?" in 2010.
What is the Boston Globe?
This is the specific thing about Stradlater's date that fuels Holden's jealousy and sparks their fight — whether Stradlater did this with Jane.
What is "give her the time" (implying intimacy)?
This elevator operator punches Holden in the stomach over a money dispute.
Who is Maurice?
This object, covered in poems written in green ink, belonged to Holden's late brother.
What is Allie's baseball mitt?
This is what Holden does with his fists on the night Allie died, badly injuring his hand.
What is breaking the garage windows?
This term, from White's essay, describes convincing yourself a place or time hasn't changed, right before reality proves otherwise.
What is the permanence illusion?
This is the U.S. state where the lake in White's essay is located.
What is Maine?
In his final plan to run away out west, discussed with Phoebe, Holden imagines pretending to have this specific disability so he'd never have to talk to or fake a conversation with anyone again.
What is being a deaf-mute?
This is the name of the hotel Holden checks into once he arrives in New York.
What is the Edmont Hotel?
This girl, remembered fondly for keeping her kings in the back row during checkers, never actually appears on-page in the novel.
Who is Jane Gallagher?
This place, reflected on in Chapter 16, comforts Holden because nothing inside it ever changes.
What is the Museum of Natural History?
This is the specific lie Holden tells Mrs. Morrow to explain why he's leaving school early.
What is (he has) a brain tumor and needs an operation?
This exact phrase, repeated multiple times in White's essay, states the illusion the narrator is trying to maintain.
What is "there had been no years"?
This is the exact physical sensation the narrator feels in the final line of White's essay.
What is "the chill of death"?
Both Holden's reflection on the museum and the turning point of White's essay hinge on one small, ordinary creature convincing the narrator that no time has passed. In White's essay, what insect lands on the narrator's fishing rod and convinces him "there had been no years"?
What is a dragonfly?
This is the record Holden buys for Phoebe in the city, which ends up broken before he can give it to her intact.
What is "Little Shirley Beans"?
This boy, mentioned only in a single memory, jumped to his death wearing a sweater he'd borrowed from Holden.
Who is James Castle?
Holden's "catcher in the rye" fantasy comes from misremembering a song lyric — he says "catch" instead of this actual word from the original poem.
What is "meet"?
Despite constantly condemning phoniness in others, Holden performs it himself in this scene, ordering drinks and flattering women he privately finds ridiculous.
What is the Lavender Room scene?
Emerson champions trusting your own judgment over any group's authority, while Fischer argues most Americans don't actually practice this — name the specific type of individualism Emerson describes that Fischer says Americans reject in practice.
What is libertarian individualism (the individual before any group, personal freedom before any allegiance)?
This is Fischer's specific term for his theory that Americans value the free choice to join a group, but expect loyalty once you're in it.
What is "communal voluntarism"?
In a 2006 international survey Fischer cites, only this percentage of Americans said people should sometimes follow their conscience over the law — the lowest of the nine nations surveyed.
What is 45 percent?