99 pages • 3 hours read
J. D. SalingerThe Catcher in the Rye
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
In the cab, Holden watches the empty late-night streets until he asks the driver, Horwitz, if he knows what happens to the ducks in Central Park in winter. Horwitz doesn’t know, but he starts talking about the fish and how they don’t go anywhere. He becomes very animated, incorrectly saying the fish absorb their nutrients from the ice while they’re frozen. When they arrive at Ernie’s, Holden invites him in for a drink, but he declines.
Inside, Ernie is playing the piano, which is a big draw at the club—the audience loves it, but Holden finds it pretentious and wishes Ernie wouldn’t be so ostentatious when he plays. Holden is seated at a small, cramped table by the wall where he can’t come and go, and he eavesdrops on the conversations around him. On one side, a man is telling his date about a football game, and on the other, a man is trying to cop a feel on his date under the table while telling a story about his dormmate’s attempted suicide. Holden thinks everyone around him is a jerk.
It’s not long before Lillian Simmons, a woman D. B. dated, recognizes Holden. She stops to talk to him, to the consternation of her date, a Navy officer. Holden tells her that D. B. is in Hollywood now, which she finds very impressive. Lillian continues the conversation, despite her date and Holden’s disinterest, and she’s blocking up the aisle while she does so. She tells Holden he’s getting handsome and finally invites him to come join them; he tells her he can’t, as he’s about to meet someone. He has no choice then but to leave the club, thinking as he does that “people are always ruining things for you” (114).
Chapter 13 Summary
Holden walks back to his hotel. It’s freezing outside, and he puts on his red hunting hat, thinking as he does so that he wishes his gloves hadn’t been stolen at Pencey. This gets him to think about what a coward he is—if he’d known who stole his gloves, he likely would’ve confronted him but then not known what to do next; in the hypothetical scenario in his mind, he ends up saying something cutting that riles up the imagined thief, then, once it’s clear that Holden is too cowardly to do anything but make accusations, fleeing to the bathroom to imagine himself as tougher than he is. All this thinking depresses him.
He briefly thinks he might stop off for a drink, but two drunks stumbling out of a bar make him reconsider. When he gets to the hotel and enters the elevator, the operator asks Holden if he’s interested in a good time. He’s offering to send up a sex worker for $5, and Holden agrees to it without thinking. The operator says he’ll send her up in 15 minutes, and Holden should pay her directly.
Back in his room, Holden cleans himself up and begins to feel nervous. He’s a virgin, and he thinks his problem is that he listens to women when they tell him to stop. He also doesn’t feel confident that he knows what he’s doing with women. He thinks that this sex worker might be a chance for him to practice.
The sex worker, Sunny, arrives. She’s young, about Holden’s age, and clearly nervous. She sits on the bed for a moment, then stands up and takes off her dress; Holden is suddenly depressed by what he’s gotten himself into. He tries to keep making conversation with her, which she’s annoyed by, and she finally asks him to hang up her dress. He does so, then asks if it’s okay if he pays her for just the conversation, saying he’s had a rough day and lying to her about a spinal cord injury.
She sits in his lap and tries to get him in the mood; when he rejects her, she gets angry, telling him that she was asleep and that he’s wasting her time. He makes her get up and pays her the $5. She tells him that it costs 10, and he refuses to pay the extra, saying that the operator made the price clear. She shrugs, calls him a crumb-bum, and leaves him alone in his room.
Chapter 14 Summary
Sitting in a chair smoking cigarettes, Holden gets even more depressed and starts talking out loud to Allie, reenacting a day when he told Allie he couldn’t come along with Holden and his friend. He thinks he might want to pray, but he’s an atheist, and instead, he thinks about his problems with the church.
There’s a knock on the door: it’s Maurice, the elevator operator, along with Sunny. Maurice wants the $5, and he shoves Holden out of the way when he refuses. Maurice and Sunny come in and make themselves comfortable; Maurice tells Holden to get the $5, but he still refuses, saying Maurice is trying to cheat him. Maurice stands up and threatens to beat Holden, but he is adamant that he doesn’t owe anyone $5. Maurice corners Holden, and Sunny takes it upon herself to get the $5 from Holden’s wallet.
Holden starts to cry, and Maurice continues to threaten him, despite Sunny’s protestations. Finally, Maurice hits Holden in his groin; Holden starts insulting him until Maurice hits him in the stomach. Holden goes down, and the two leave him alone.
Holden stays on the floor feeling like he’s dying, then gets up and walks to the bathroom. He starts to pretend the pain in his stomach is from a bullet, and he imagines going downstairs with a gun of his own to get his revenge on Maurice before calling up Jane and having her bandage his wounds. He finally gets in bed and contemplates suicide; the only thing he thinks is keeping him from leaping from the window is the thought of someone finding his body.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
Holden is a misfit in high society, and his Longing for Connection outside his social circle is no easier to resolve. His interaction with Horwitz the cab driver is one example of this. While Holden is still hung up on the idea of the ducks having nowhere to go in winter, Horwitz’s mind instantly goes to the fish, who face a much more dire situation. Their thinking aligns with their place in society: Holden is lost and wayward, but his struggle is nothing like the struggles of working-class New Yorkers, and Horwitz would likely view Holden’s problems as frivolous. The novel draws attention to this difference obliquely without undermining Holden’s own experience with depression and grief, but his growing awareness of how he doesn’t fit into any part of New York society fuels his troubled mind.
Holden’s encounter with the sex worker and Maurice, the pimp/elevator operator, emphasizes the way he isn’t ready for the adult world he’s been experiencing, particularly when it comes to sex. He’s a virgin, and he makes it clear that he doesn’t understand the power dynamics of a sexual encounter. He agrees to have the sex worker sent up to his room in his attempt to enter the adult world, but as soon as he meets Sunny the sex worker, who is clearly as young as him but has a casual attitude about sex, he becomes depressed and finds a way out of it. This marks a turning point in his thinking; from here, he starts noticing the children around him and gravitates toward their world instead of the adult world. This makes explicit The Desire to Preserve Childhood Innocence.
His encounter with Maurice, in which Maurice demands another $5, is emblematic of one of Holden’s central character traits: he is deeply concerned with a sense of fairness, to the point that he’s willing to put himself in harm’s way. But just as he thinks to himself when he’s walking home from the bar earlier in the evening, he’s unable to follow through on his desire to stand up for himself, and he ends up taking a beating rather than letting the $5 go; Holden’s sense of what matters to him is absolute, and whether it’s flunking out of school or getting beaten up by Stradlater or Maurice, there’s no compromise.
Related Titles
By J. D. Salinger
