"I kept walking and walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie on or anything. Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again,” he narrates. Soon after, he meets back up with Phoebe, presumably to give back her “Christmas dough” then to run away. He changes his mind after she stubbornly insists to run away with him. He instead takes her to ride the carousel, where he eventually seems to come to the devastating and uplifting conclusion that completes his story: the not outright but obvious realization that he cannot be the “catcher in the rye” and therefore cannot protect himself, or Phoebe, or anyone from “falling off the edge” and growing up. He may not have to conform in his thoughts, but he most move on, surrender to what adulthood is, and let everyone else fall off the carousel reaching for the gold ring even if he's not sure what the gold ring is, or if he really wants it anyway. It's the pursuit, the falling, and the scrambling back up to stretch out your hands back toward the ring that matters – and the human motivation behind it. “The thing with kids is,” Holden says, “if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.” Finally, it begins to rain. Holden says, quite significantly, “My hunting hat really gave me a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway.” This can be interpreted as his search for identity protected him from the outside world, but he had to let it in, and “get soaked” with adulthood in the downpour of growing up eventually in spite of his resistance, or perhaps partially because of it.
exerpt from my essay
that I just now wrote
oh my gosh
so much coffee went into all of this
so
much
