the meaning of the catcher in the rye title
The Catcher in the Rye Holden decides to meet his old classmate, a Columbia student named Carl Luce, for drinks at the Wicker Bar in the Seton Hotel. During the meeting, Holden annoys Carl with his fixation on sex. After Luce leaves, Holden gets drunk, awkwardly flirts with several adults, and calls an icy Sally. Exhausted and out of money, Holden wanders over to Central Park to investigate the ducks, breaking Phoebe's record on the way. Nostalgically recalling his experience in elementary school and the unchanging dioramas in the Museum of Natural History that he enjoyed visiting as a child, Holden heads home to see Phoebe. He sneaks into his parents' apartment while they are out, and wakes up Phoebe â€“ the only person with whom he seems to be able to communicate his true feelings. Although Phoebe is happy to see Holden, she quickly deduces that he has been expelled, and chastises him for his aimlessness and his apparent dislikes towards everything. When asked if he cares about anything, Holden shares a selfless fantasy he has been thinking about (based on a mishearing of Robert Burns's Comin' Through the Rye): he pictures himself as the sole guardian of thousands of children playing in a huge rye field on the edge of a cliff. His job is to catch the children if, in their abandon, they come close to falling off the brink; to be, in effect, the "catcher in the rye". Because of this misinterpretation, Holden believes that to be the "catcher in the rye" means to save children from losing their innocence.