The Catcher in the Rye
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The Catcher in the Rye Chapter 7 Summary
- Holden gets to Ackley's room and is all, "How about playing Canasta?" and Ackley is all, "Stop bleeding all over my room."
- Because Ackley's roommate Ely is out of town, Holden asks to sleep in his bed, probably so he doesn't have to go back and face Stradlater.
- Ackley refuses, since he doesn't know what time his roommate is going to get back.
- He does want to know what the fight was about, however, and Holden jokes he was defending Ackley's honor to his roommate.
- Holden lies in Ely's bed and thinks about Jane – more specifically, about Jane with Stradlater in the back of Ed Banky's car. He says most of the guys at Pencey just talk about sex, but Stradlater actually does it.
- Holden recounts a night when he double-dated with Stradlater in the very same car. Holden was in the front with his date and Stradlater in the back with his. He says all night he could hear Stradlater coercing his date, with a very quiet, sincere voice, while she said things like "No – please. Please don't" and so on and so forth.
- By now, Ackley has fallen asleep. Holden wakes him up and asks him what's the deal with joining a monastery, and if you have to be Catholic to do it. He adds that he'd probably join the wrong kind of monastery, anyway – the kind with a bunch of "stupid bastards."
- Ackley resents this seeming attack on his religion (we now know he's Catholic – he talked earlier about going to Mass the next day, Sunday).
- Holden leaves snippily.
- Walking down the empty (and depressing) dorm corridor, Holden figures now is as good of time as any to leave Pencey.
- He packs up quickly (without waking Stradlater) and gets depressed about the ice skates that his mother sent him a few days earlier. She bought him the wrong kind, but he still feels guilt that he got the ax again at school. Besides, he says, every time he gets a present, it makes him sad.
- Holden sits down to count up his money (he says "dough").
- But about this dough: Holden has a decent chunk since his grandmother just sent him money for his birthday, which she does about four times a year.
- Holden goes down the hall and sells his ninety-dollar typewriter for twenty bucks.
- Just as he's leaving, Holden, "sort of crying," puts on his red hunting hat and yells down the corridor at the top of his lungs, "Sleep tight, ya morons!" He almost trips on some peanut shells one of those morons left all over the stairs.
