‘Why am I here’? You can almost hear him thinking it! He is looking for love, and affection. The only few times you see him more cheerful in this book are when he is with the few people who love and care about him especially Phoebe, his sister. Holden and Phoebe get along quite well. An example of a time when Phoebe shows Holden the affection he desires is when Holden goes to his parent’s house to see phoebe and she greets him. ‘She put her arms around my neck and all. She's very affectionate.’
At various points throughout the novel, Holden asks two complete strangers to join him for a drink. This shows how desperate he is for someone to talk to; it doesn’t matter who they are he just wants someone! He needs human interaction; someone to tell him he is on the right path and that everything will be alright. It also demonstrates that he is looking for someone to give him the love and affection he wants so much, he needs to be accepted. Two examples of this are when he asks a cab driver ‘Would you care to stop on the way and join me for a cocktail, on me, I’m loaded’, and when he is on the train he asks Mrs Morrow who is the mother of one of his school friends, ‘would you care for a cocktail? We can go to the club car’. Both decline his desperate offer.
Throughout the novel, he is always very depressed and suicidal. An example of a time he shows us this is when he says ‘I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn't want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory’.
The Fact that he is always depressed and suicidal is not helped by the fact that he drinks and smokes to excess. Throughout the few days on which the novel is set you do not read that Holden has eaten a proper meal.
Holden is on a quest in the novel. His quest is to stop children from becoming adults and entering adolescence. He explains this by saying; ‘Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.’
His quest is to stop all the innocent little children from having to go through what he is going through, to stop them from being sucked into the world of adolescence. He has phrased this as ‘What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff’. Although there is more understanding of teenagers in the present day the progression from childhood to adulthood still presents a lot of the issues that Salinger writes about in this novel. You were either a child or an adult, there was no transition.
At the end of the novel, Holden meets Phoebe and they go to the zoo, because earlier on in the day, he gets a note sent to her at school to let her know that he is going away. But when he and phoebe spends some time together, he takes her to go on the carousel and realises what matters to him the most, the people who love him. So he decides to go home. His quest is complete. He has found out who the people who love him most are and he has found the love and affection he wanted.