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Holden watches Phoebe as she rides the carousel. As he does, his connections are sublime and occur on many levels. He connects with Phoebe and, in doing so, mystically with his brother Allie, finding in his sister an embodiment of the same innocence that had kept him tied to Allie. In finding Phoebe, Holden releases Allie, whose values and purity he now recognizes have been born again within his sister. By releasing the dead, he embraces the living. In a very real way, just as the memory of Allie held Holden to stagnancy, his union with Phoebe releases him to life.

Perhaps most important, Holden connects with himself. As he watches Phoebe, he does so as an adult. Yet he is overwhelmed by her beauty and touches a remnant of his own innocence. Realizing that he has retained these capabilities, Holden cries from joy and relief. He accepts that he can enter the adult world and not be phony. As an adult, he can still be “swell.”

For J. D. Salinger, writing The Catcher in the Rye was an act of cleansing. Through it, he relieved himself of a weight he had carried since the end of the war. The crush of Salinger’s faith, threatened by the terrible events of war, so full of blackness and death, is reflected in Holden’s loss of faith, caused by the death of his brother. The memory of fallen friends haunted Salinger for years, just as Holden was haunted by the ghost of Allie. On this point, Salinger made a slip of the pen. In renaming the character of Kenneth Caulfield, he chose a term used to represent fellow soldiers of the Second World War.

The struggle of Holden Caulfield echoes the spiritual journey of the author. In both author and character, the tragedy is the same: a shattered innocence. Holden’s reaction is shown through his scorn of adult phoniness and compromise. Salinger’s reaction was personal despondency, through which his eyes were opened to the darker forces of human nature.

Both, however, eventually came to terms with the burdens they carried, and their epiphanies were the same. Just as Holden comes to realize he can enter adulthood without becoming false and sacrificing his values, Salinger came to accept that the knowledge of evil did not ensure damnation.

*Lobrano did not reveal the identity of the other editor who reviewed Catcher. However, upon the novel’s completion, Salinger personally read its contents to his friend William Maxwell, who was unlikely to have expressed a negative reaction in Salinger’s presence.

*The photograph of Salinger that appeared on the back of Catcher was one of two taken by the famous photographer Lotte Jacobi. For some unknown reason, the photograph was reversed when transferred to the dust jacket. When asked her opinion of Salinger as a sitter, Jacobi responded that she found him “interesting.”

*The episode so irritated Salinger that by December 11, eight months after the phone call, he had yet to reestablish direct contact with Woodburn.

*Salinger’s distress over the encounter with Olivier, though certainly sincere, appears somewhat belated. In letters written home from England, he mentioned having met Olivier and Leigh with self-satisfaction. Only after returning home and learning that the Oliviers were planning a visit to New York and wanted to see him did Salinger pen his letter of apology.

*The New Yorker took advantage of the publicity surrounding Catcher and, two days before the novel’s release, published “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” a story Salinger had written in 1948.

*Holden’s reference to Dickens’s David Copperfield in chapter 1 perhaps delivers a secondary message. The first chapter of the Dickens novel cites Copperfield as having been born in a caul, a membrane that surrounds newborns. Holden Caulfield’s name has been analyzed repeatedly, often with this reference in mind. The conjunction of “caul” with “field” and the similarity between “Holden” and “Hold on” easily satisfies. However, Salinger first named Holden Caulfield in 1941, years before he ever conceived of a field of rye. This