J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [117]
When she learns of Holden’s intentions, Phoebe is rightly angry and hurt. She devises her own plan. She will call Holden back to reality by packing her bags and feigning to go with him. This will force Holden to choose between her and Allie, between responsibility and memory. She meets Holden the next day, carrying her suitcase. When Phoebe tells Holden she is going with him, he does not take well to the idea and tries to convince her that she cannot go. Refusing now to speak to her brother or allow him to touch her, Phoebe switches roles—playing the part of Holden and forcing him to deal with her as an adult would.
The moment of connection, of Holden’s passage into adulthood, does not occur at the carousel. It happens beforehand, while he and Phoebe are arguing. In this scene, Holden promises to collect his bags and go straight home but only if Phoebe will return to school. This is catching, not meeting, and Phoebe is not convinced that Holden is sincere. She tells her brother to do whatever he wants to do, but she is not going back to school regardless. Then she tells her brother to shut up. The words are a slap across the face, and Holden is changed. He asks Phoebe to walk with him to the Central Park Zoo. “If I let you not go back to school this afternoon and go for a little walk, will you cut out this crazy stuff?” he asks. “Will you go back to school like a good girl?” Despite the maturity of Holden’s words, Phoebe is still switching roles. She runs away from Holden, just as he had planned to run away. But Holden is unmoved. He then utters perhaps the most significant lines of the novel: “I didn’t follow her, though. I knew she’d follow me.”
The derivation of this scene and the course of Holden’s transformation can be found in previous stories. The power of Charles’s words to rejuvenate Sergeant X in “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” is similar to the power of Phoebe’s words to awaken her brother Holden. Lionel Tannenbaum’s realization of the pain he has caused his mother in “Down at the Dinghy” is like the awareness Phoebe’s words deliver to Holden. The strength found through mutual dependence and compromise by Babe and Mattie Gladwaller as they sled down Spring Street is also found here. This is not simply the moment when Holden Caulfield enters adulthood. It is the moment of connection, when he stops catching and begins to meet others. There are other stories too where portions of this scene can be found, but its message is most clearly expressed by Holden’s younger brother in “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls.” In that story, Kenneth—now Allie—warned Vincent against being too reticent to relinquish self and embrace the connection with others that comes from selfless love. In the same story, he lamented Holden’s inability to compromise and wondered if Holden would ever surmount that inflexibility.
By relinquishing his own needs, Holden does compromise. He compromises out of love for his sister. Holden’s compromise is not surrender. It is balance. It is the same balance that Seymour Glass teaches his brother Buddy when playing marbles. It is balance attained by releasing oneself in order to find the place of perfect connection. And from that point on, Holden Caulfield speaks as an adult. He does not enter adulthood because he has been beaten into submission by the world around him or by seeing the virtue of maturity. He becomes an adult because that is what his sister needs.
There is a delicate but pervasive element of Zen belief in Catcher’s carousel scene that elevates it to a spiritual event. Its magnitude is transmitted through the reader’s instinct rather than narrative text. The message of Holden’s transformation is intangible and is experienced by the reader rather than dictated. Salinger did not need to deliver a sermon on Zen or innocence or even love. The combination of subtle props and small events that surrounds this