The Catcher in the Rye

After leaving Mr. Antolini's apartment in the middle of the night, disturbed by what he interprets as a sexual advance when he wakes to find Antolini patting his head, Holden wanders New York in a state of increasing exhaustion and despair. He spends the remaining hours before dawn sitting in the waiting room at Grand Central Terminal, his money nearly gone and his sense of isolation total. By morning he has decided that the city, and the people in it, are irredeemably phony and empty, and he resolves to head out West alone, to live as a deaf-mute gas station attendant in a log cabin, cut off from having to talk to or deal with anyone.

Before leaving, he arranges to meet his younger sister Phoebe at lunchtime to say goodbye and explain his plan. He leaves a note for her at her school, telling her to meet him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When she arrives, she is carrying a packed suitcase, having decided she wants to go West with him. Holden refuses to take her, which upsets and angers her; she walks off ahead of him in a sulk. He follows her toward the Central Park Zoo, trying to make peace by giving her his hunting hat, but she remains furious and won't speak to him.

He manages to cheer her by letting her skip school and offering to buy her a ticket for the carousel near the zoo. As she rides, Phoebe's anger dissolves, and she and Holden reconcile. It begins to rain heavily, but Holden refuses to take shelter, staying to watch her go around and around on the carousel, and he is overcome with a sudden, powerful happiness watching her in that moment — abandoning, implicitly, his plan to run away out West.

In a brief closing frame, Holden mentions, without elaborating much, that he went home that night, that something happened with his parents, that he got sick, and that he was sent to a sanatorium or rest home in California, near his older brother D.B. He says a psychoanalyst there has been asking whether he intends to apply himself when he goes back to school in September, and Holden isn't sure how to answer. The novel closes with Holden saying he's sorry he told the whole story to as many people as he did, and that he finds himself missing almost everyone he described, even Stradlater and Ackley — advising the reader never to tell anybody anything, because you end up missing people once you talk about them.