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 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
After the customary Saturday night steak dinner, which Holden presumes is so the parents who visit on Sundays will be impressed about what the students are eating, Holden and his friend Mal Broussard intend to head into town to see a movie. Holden asks if he can invite Ackley, and Mal begrudgingly agrees.
Back in his room, Holden waits for Ackley to get ready by opening a window and packing a snowball. He carries it with him until the bus driver makes him throw it out. Broussard and Ackley have both seen the movie, so instead the three of them eat hamburgers and play pinball for a while before heading back.
When they return, Ackley won’t leave Holden’s room, and he tells him an obvious lie about sleeping with a girl. Eventually, Holden uses the excuse of Stradlater’s composition to get Ackley to leave.
Holden writes about his brother Allie’s baseball mitt, which was covered in poems so Allie would have something to read in the outfield. Allie was Holden’s younger brother, and he died of leukemia a few years before the events of the novel. Holden was 13 when Allie died, and he remembers his brother as a kind, almost angelic figure. The night Allie died, Holden broke all the windows in the garage with his fist, which still hurts him sometimes.
He feels bad about changing Allie’s name on the composition to hide the fact that he wrote it, but it’s clear that Holden got catharsis out of writing about his brother in this way. He finishes around 10:30 pm and spends some time staring out the window, listening to Ackley snore.
Chapter 6 Summary
Holden becomes very worried about Stradlater’s date with Jane, and he sits up waiting for him to return. When Stradlater returns, he’s more interested in the composition than in the date he just had; when he reads it, he becomes angry with Holden, telling him he does everything wrong and it’s no wonder he’s flunking out. Holden grows angry and rips up the composition before getting in bed to smoke a cigarette; it’s against the rules, and he’s doing it pointedly to annoy Stradlater.
When Stradlater doesn’t say anything about Jane, Holden finally starts asking questions. He’s worried he got her in trouble, staying out too late, but Stradlater says it was fine; they didn’t go to New York, opting instead to hang out in a car. When Stradlater won’t say what happened between them, Holden attacks him.
Stradlater pins Holden easily, and Holden swears at him and calls him a moron. Holden pretends to calm down so Stradlater will let him up, then continues calling him names. Stradlater hits him hard enough that he goes down, cracking his head on the floor, which makes Stradlater worried. Holden stays on the ground until Stradlater heads to the bathroom, then gathers his hat, looks at his bloodied face in the mirror, and crosses into Ackley’s room.
Chapter 7 Summary
Ackley is awake because of the noise of Holden and Stradlater’s fight, and he’s alarmed to see Holden’s bloodied face; Holden tries to be nonchalant, asking if Ackley wants to play Canasta. Ackley keeps asking about the cause of the fight, and Holden finally says he was standing up for Ackley after Stradlater criticized him. When this excites Ackley, Holden admits he’s only kidding and lays down in the empty bed of Ely, who is away for the weekend.
Laying there, Holden can’t stop thinking about Stradlater and Jane; he’s worried because Stradlater is the kind of person who really does have sex with women instead of just claiming to. He gets depressed about it and wakes Ackley again, asking what it’s like to join a monastery. Ackley thinks Holden is mocking Catholicism; Holden takes this as his cue to leave.
At first, he thinks he might go see what Mal Broussard is up to, but he quickly decides he’ll go to New York and stay in a hotel until it’s time to head home to his parents. He goes back to his room and packs a bag, thinking about his mother’s coming disappointment as he does so. After counting his money, he decides to go down the hall and sell his typewriter to another student for $20.
As he’s preparing to leave, Holden begins to cry. Then he yells “Sleep tight, ya morons!” at the top of his lungs and heads down the stairs (68).
Chapter 8 Summary
Holden walks to the train station, lugging his suitcases behind him, where he catches a train to the city. On trains, he usually buys magazines and a sandwich, but tonight he doesn’t feel like it; he’d rather do nothing. It’s not long before a woman in her mid-forties gets on and sits next to Holden, even though the train is empty.
Holden finds her quite attractive, despite their age difference, and when she sees the Pencey sticker on his luggage, she reveals that she’s the mother of Ernest Morrow, one of Holden’s classmates. Holden doesn’t like Ernest, who has a habit of snapping his wet towel at people in the dorm, and he lies to the woman, saying his name is Rudolf Schmidt, which is the dorm janitor’s name.
They start talking about Ernest, and she admits her son is sensitive, which Holden finds funny. Holden offers her a cigarette, and she accepts. Holden takes an opportunity to look at her, and she tells him his nose is bleeding. He lies and says he was hit with a snowball. The conversation turns back to Ernest, and Holden makes up an elaborate lie about Ernest refusing to run for office in the school election even though he would win. He tells her that she’s right about how shy her son is and that he needs to lighten up.
When the conductor comes around and interrupts the story, Holden asks the woman if she’d like to share a drink with him; she asks him if he’s allowed to buy drinks, and he tells her that his unusual height and premature gray hair help him get away with it most of the time. She asks him why he’s headed home from Pencey a few days early, and he tells her he’s going to have an operation to remove a brain tumor. Holden grows bored with lying to her, then, and the conversation fizzles. She gets off the train and tells Holden to visit over the summer, which Holden declines with another lie.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Holden choosing to write Stradlater’s paper about his deceased brother’s baseball glove is emblematic of Holden’s problem with prep school: When he’s given an assignment like describing a house or a room (which was Stradlater’s original assignment), he finds no use for it, but he’s more than capable as a student when he feels connected to an assignment’s purpose. As an object, the baseball mitt represents his brother’s sense of wonder about the world and literature. It also symbolizes Allie’s impact on Holden: Holden views Allie as a child who was almost magical in his innocence, and the unresolved grief over his brother’s death looms large over Holden’s current circumstances and his desire to preserve an identity that’s closer to Allie’s youth than D. B.’s jaded adulthood. This introduces the theme of The Desire to Preserve Childhood Innocence.
When Stradlater arrives home, he can only view the assignment as a moment when Holden lets him down, saying, “You always do everything backasswards” (53). Holden’s anger in response to this is two-fold: he’s angry that Stradlater isn’t able to see the meaning in what he’s written, and he’s angry that he’s been worrying about Stradlater’s date with Jane this whole time; Holden’s behavior—doing the wrong homework in the first place and then tearing it up when Stradlater protests—suggests that he is acting out the anger that he doesn’t know how to articulate. For Holden, the outrage that he feels about the phoniness of the world is often tangled up with moments when he is thinking about what he sees as the more authentic youth (when Allie was alive) that he experienced and wishes to preserve. All of this is simmering in the background when he goads Stradlater into fighting him, which is ultimately what leads him to leave Pencey a few days early to head into the city.
The moment at the end of Chapter 7 brings Holden’s red hunting cap to the foreground as an important symbol and marker of Holden’s mood—the fact that he wears it backward (“the way I liked it”) and puts it on right before screaming “Sleep tight, ya morons!” makes it clear that, for Holden, the hat is an act of open defiance, a marker of his choice to be a misfit (68). Even this moment in which he is firmly asserting himself as a rebel is tinged with sadness, as he’s crying without really understanding why; the hat is also about his insecurity. The hat will continue to take on meaning throughout the novel, culminating in the final moments of the book when his little sister, Phoebe, puts it on his head as an act of acceptance.
Holden often lies to the people in his life, as he does with Ackley and, later, Ernie’s mother on the train. He presents this as fun and games, and sometimes he’s using his lies to make fun of someone, but often the lies he tells are meant to ingratiate someone to him or engender sympathy. Holden doesn’t recognize his behavior as the kind of phoniness he despises in those around him, though they are similar, and the game he plays with Ernie’s mother—telling her a fabricated story about how humble her son is—is motivated by equal parts desire, casual cruelty, and boredom. He doesn’t regret it, though, as he has such a low opinion of Ernie that he feels like the lie might save his mother from the truth. It’s typical of Holden’s character for his noble ideals and his baser impulses to conflict, and the way Holden lies and mocks the people around him is both a defense mechanism (trying to keep people from seeing who he is and what he’s going through) and a rebellion against polite society.
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