Janet Phillips on the Iconic Little Sister in J.D. Salinger’s Seminal Coming-of-Age Tale
Perhaps every sixteen-year-old boy needs a smart sister like Phoebe Caulfield. Discerning movie critic, reader, author of detective stories, skater and mean dancer, she is a very accomplished ten-year-old and the only character in The Catcher in the Rye who seems able to cast a benign influence on her troubled brother.
In his distinctive, confiding voice, Holden mentions her early on in the novel—”She’s all right. You’d like her”—and his thoughts run back to her like a refrain, punctuating the directionless two days in Manhattan which follow his expulsion from Pencey School. He wants to call her but he can’t in case his mother answers the phone. He wishes he could hang out with her instead of jock schoolmates, incomprehensible girlfriends, phony adults or reprimanding teachers. To cheer himself up he buys her a record he knows she will like, and tries to find her at the Mall and at Central Park where he remembers she likes to rollerskate. Finally, it is the thought of how sad she would be if he died from pneumonia on a freezing December night that propels him home to see her, even though he runs the risk of being intercepted by his parents, who don’t yet know that he has been expelled from his fourth school. Phoebe—or rather the thought of Phoebe—draws him slowly back to the family he is avoiding.
