“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 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.”- Holden Caulfield
Summary
The novel tackles about the three-day journey of young teenager, Holden Caulfield to find what he really likes to do in life. The novel begins as he describes how his school, Pencey Prep, is surrounded by “phonies” and he says that he failed almost all his subjects except English. Afterwards, he gets into a fight with his roommate, and then he decides to leave the school, and stay in a hotel in New York. Meanwhile, through his stay in New York, he meets different people, and then he shares his realizations to his younger sister, Phoebe that he wants to be a “Catcher in the Rye”.