In Catcher in the Rye, Holden decides to leave New York to head out West after he experiences a frightening feeling of “just go[ing] down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see [him] again” (217). Yet, Holden decides to visit Phoebe one last time before leaving, so he pays a visit to her school. Holden’s experience of “go[ing] down, down, down” mirrors the image of someone falling off a cliff like in Holden’s imagination as a “catcher in the rye” (191). In a way, Holden himself is a child in the rye and he’s afraid to go over the cliff because he doesn’t know what will happen and he’s afraid he will become a “phony”, hypocritical adult. He even scares himself and “[thinks he is] going to vomit” (216) when he laughs at two men calling a Christmas tree a “sonuvabitch” (216). As a result, Holden “runs away from the edge of the cliff” quite literally when he decides to “start hitchhiking [his] way out West” (218). Yet Holden stops by Phoebe’s school first even though Holden makes it clear that he hates schools like Pencey because “[i]t’s full of phonies” (145). Holden’s willing decision to visit a school shows his deep reliance on Phoebe as his reassurance of innocence.
