Holden Caulfield Timeline and Summary

After receiving notice that he's been kicked out of Pencey because he's failing four out of five classes, Holden goes to say good-bye to Mr. Spencer, his history teacher. Mr. Spencer chews him out, and Holden responds by trying to make his teacher feel better about having to flunk him.
Holden messes around with his dorm-mate, Ackley, and finds out that his roommate, Stradlater, has a date with his old friend, Jane Gallagher. This bothers him, so he spends more time with Ackley to avoid thinking about it.
He also writes an essay for Stradlater about his dead brother's baseball mitt, which has poems written on it in green ink. In fact, the mitt is just a catapult for a digression on Allie and the impact his death had on Holden, who broke all the windows in his garage in response.
When Stradlater returns, Holden provokes a fight. He's incredibly upset at the thought that Stradlater might have hooked up with a girl for whom, from what we can tell, Holden has intense personal feelings.
Being smaller and weaker than Stradlater, Holden loses the fight and wanders into Ackley's room, only to surmise about becoming a monk in a monastery.
This doesn't go anywhere, so he takes off. Seeing the empty corridor, he decides to get the heck out of Pencey and bum around New York for a few days. (It's Saturday, and he can't go home until Wednesday unless he wants his parents to know he's been kicked out.)
On the train, Holden runs into a classmate's (Ernie Morrow) mother. She seems pretty sexy for her age. Holden lies about her son, saying he's a good guy, humble and modest, when in fact Holden thinks the exact opposite. Holden invites her to have a drink with him, but she declines.
Now in New York City, Holden thinks about calling Jane, or his brother D.B., or his sister Phoebe, or any other acquaintances, but he ends up not calling anybody after about twenty minutes of deliberation.
Once in a cab, Holden asks the driver if he knows where the ducks go in the winter. The guy doesn't know. He invites the taxi driver for a drink, but the man declines.
Holden gets a room at a hotel and calls a woman (Faith Cavendish) whom he doesn't know, but has been told likes to "do it" on occasion. He chickens out when she offers to meet him the next night instead.
With one strike behind his belt, Holden wanders down to the bar, where the waiter refuses to serve him any alcohol.
After eyeing a blonde across the room, Holden dances with her and her two "moron" friends.
He ends up buying all of them drinks and feeling sorry for them, since they can't carry on a conversation and have come all the way from Seattle just to engage in the phony New York life.
Once the women leave (and stick him with the bill), Holden heads out to the lobby and gets to thinking (again) about Jane Gallagher.
He reveals what seem to be genuine feelings for Jane, and through the narration of a single checkers-playing episode hints that she may have been sexually abused by her stepfather.
His relationship with her, we find out, is romantic, but not really sexual in any way.
Holden gets into yet another cab and again asks the driver if he knows where the ducks in Central Park's pond go in the winter. The cabbie gets mad and says he doesn't know but the fish get frozen along with the water and take in nutrients through the ice.
Holden invites the cabbie for a drink, and again is turned down.
He ends up at Ernie's, a nightclub in Greenwich Village (where apparently you can drink at sixteen) and runs into an ex-girlfriend of his older brother, D.B. She annoys him and, when she invites him to join her and her date, he leaves to avoid having to do so.
Holden walks all the way home (41 blocks) to the hotel.
Once he's back, Maurice, the elevator man, asks him if he'd like a visit from a prostitute: it's fifteen bucks for all night, five bucks for a "throw." Holden says sure, why not. Though it's against his principles, he'd like to get some practice in. You know, in case he's ever married and has to know how to do these things.
The prostitute's name is Sunny and she's not much older than Holden.
When she shows up in his room, Holden realizes he's not so much in the mood and he'd rather just talk.
Sunny's not used to that, so she decides to leave. She tries to charge ten dollars, but Holden only pays her five, since that's what he heard from Maurice.
Because he can't fall asleep, Holden tries talking to Allie to make himself feel better (a tactic he says he uses often). In this particular case, he's re-living an episode from his childhood when he wouldn't allow Allie to hang out with him.
Because he regrets this now, Holden imagines changing the scenario and allowing Allie to participate in the BB gun fun.
Shortly after, Maurice and Sunny show up looking for the extra five dollars. Maurice shoves Holden and, at being called a moron by a crying Holden, punches him in the stomach as well.
Once they leave, Holden imagines that Maurice has shot him in the gut.
As he tries to fall asleep, he says he'd jump out the window and commit suicide if he wasn't worried about everyone below looking at his gory body afterwards.
The next day, Holden gives Sally Hayes a buzz. They arrange to meet for an afternoon matinee (even though Holden hates the movies since they are phony).
Holden puts his bags at Grand Central Station and has breakfast at a little diner, where he donates ten dollars to two nuns and discusses Romeo and Juliet with one of them. He has a hard time getting over the fact that a nun could like a sexy play like that.
Holden decides to buy the Little Shirley Beans record for Phoebe; on the way to the store, he overhears (and perhaps mishears) the little boy singing "If a body catch a body coming through the rye."
After breakfast, Holden goes to the park to wait for Sally. While there, he runs into a little kid who knows Phoebe and says she might have gone to the museum with her class. He helps her tighten her skates.
Holden remembers it is Sunday (and Phoebe is therefore not on a field trip), but he decides to go to the museum anyway.
On the walk over, he contemplates that, while the museum stays unchanging, a person is different every time he goes back.
By the time he gets there, he's no longer in the mood to go in; he heads off to meet Sally.
Holden sees the movie with Sally, makes out with her, and tells her he loves her.
They go ice skating; he brings up the possibility that they could run away together, and yells at her when she's less than enthusiastic about it. They fight and Holden leaves.
He tries calling Jane but nobody answers. Instead, he arranges to meet his friend Carl Luce that evening at the Wicker Bar. Then he goes to a movie to pass the time.
That evening, he gets pretty drunk. Carl gets fed up because all Holden wants is to talk about sex. He tells Holden he needs to see a shrink and grow up.
A very drunk Holden calls Sally up and generally makes a fool out of himself.
He heads to the park, drunk and freezing cold, to check on the ducks. He can't find them anywhere.
At last, Holden makes it home to see Phoebe. Finding that his parents are out, he chats with his sister for a bit.
When Phoebe guesses that he's been kicked out and asks him what he wants to do with his life, he answers that he wants to be a catcher in the rye.
He imagines a big field of rye, with all these little kids playing in it, and he catches them just before they accidentally fall off a big cliff.
Holden calls up Mr. Antolini, an old English teacher of his, and arranges to head over to his place.
He hides while his mother comes home and talks with Phoebe, then borrows his sister's Christmas money to take with him.
Holden goes to the Antolinis' apartment. There, he talks about how and why he flunked out of Pencey.
He has a hard time paying attention while Mr. Antolini gives him a long speech about how Holden is setting himself up for a bad fall. Education, Mr. Antolini argues, is hugely important.
Once Holden has gone to sleep on the couch, he wakes up to find Mr. Antolini sitting on the floor beside the couch, petting his hair. He freaks out, thinking Mr. Antolini is coming on to him, and leaves, even though it's the middle of the night.
Holden walks around until morning. As he crosses from one curb to the next, he gets worried that he'll disappear in between; he begins to pray to his little brother Allie not to let him disappear, and thanks him every time he reaches the other curb.
Holden indulges in another escape fantasy where he can hitchhike out west and live as a deaf-mute so he doesn't have to listen or talk to anybody. He can marry a deaf-mute, they can live in the woods, and hide their children away from the world.
But first he has to go say good-bye to Phoebe. He heads to her school and sends a note in with the secretary for her to meet him at lunch so he can give her money back before he takes off.
While at the school, Holden rubs off one piece of graffiti that says "fuck you," but notes the impossibility of erasing all the "fuck you" signs in the world.
Holden goes to the museum to kill some time. He explains all about mummies to two kids (brothers), passes out in the bathroom, and sees yet another "fuck you" sign.
At lunch, Phoebe shows up to meet Holden – with a suitcase. She wants to go with him. Holden says no, and she gets into a tiff. Even so, she won't let him out of her sight as he leads her (from across the street) to the zoo and then the carousel. There, he tells her he won't leave; he'll come home with her instead.
Phoebe rides the carousel twice. Holden stands there in the rain, watching her, incredibly happy.
Holden does in fact go home. The final chapter explains that he's in therapy and everybody keeps asking him what he thinks about all of this.
Everyone wants to know if he'll apply himself next year in school.
He says he doesn't know. It's a stupid question, he says, how should he know what he'll end up doing?
Holden says he wishes he had never started talking about all of this in the first place; once he started telling these stories, he began missing everybody.
Yes, everybody.

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