'Hey listen...'

Holden needs someone to listen to him.

I would argue the whole quest (think about ‘Bildungsroman’ context here) to find someone who will listen to him
He is clearly concerned about his growing up, his hyperbole illustrates how it’s happening all too fast for him!

‘l’ve grown six and half inches in the past year’

 

His hair is ‘full of millions of gray hairs’

^^^ Symbols of impending adulthood

He is, all and all, very self-conscious about his growing up.

No wonder! In his eyes, growing up is like a ‘death’…
Think about his famous image of the idyllic field of rye, I mean the adult world is the ‘fall’ so to speak in this image.

This concern drives him from person to person, he desperately seeks help about this terrifying transition… but is terrible at communicating

[Note here. Context on anti-heroes. American anti-heroes were thought to be more proactive than their French counterparts. French antiheroes are marked instead by ennui and boredom. American types are marked by their inability to communicate]

Carl Luce

With Carl Luce he ‘self-alienates’. I mean he is unbearably crude in this scene.

‘what are you majoring in?... Perverts?’
But note, in this scene he repeats the phrase ‘Hey listen’… ‘Hey, Carl, listen…’

Essay term: ‘anaphora’… for the repetition of a phrase. Fancy phrase.
But due to his immaturity Carl doesn’t have time for him. He cuts Holden off, unwilling to ‘listen’. Do we have sympathy for Holden here? Does he bring it upon himself?

Sally Hayes

This ‘character interaction’ illustrates how he is an UNRELIABLE NARRATOR.
Sally reproaches Holden for ‘screaming’ at him. Holden says this is ‘crap’, thinking she’s exaggerating. He is unaware of his own flaws. He calls everyone else ‘phoney’ but fails to look introspectively and engage with his own problems.
Instead he wants to ESCAPE. He wants to ‘go out West’ and live as a ‘deaf mute’. A kind of ESCAPISM
He presents a parody of a pioneer man. He wants to travel out West not to pursue the American Dream but to isolate himself and live poorly. He wouldn’t have ‘stupid useless conversations with anybody’… this being an indication of how no one has so far helped him. Listened to him.    

Mr Antolini

He offers hope for Holden. Offering advice. ‘Listen to me a minute now…’
He invokes the same ‘falling motif’ that Holden does, warning him that he’s ‘riding for a special kind of fall’.
Yet this is not the same fall Holden imagines. Mr A warns him that he needs to talk advice and ‘apply himself’ to do this. Exactly what Holden doesn’t want to do. That would mean growing up.

Mr A is clever. He realises that Holden despises education. He associates it firmly with the bourgeois ‘phoney’ ivy league world.  He presents education instead as ‘poetry’, as ‘history’.

‘A reciprocal arrangement’… Holden needs to listen and learn first. Except Holden only wants to aggressively seek out people to listen to him. He refuses to anyone’s advice. Not Mr Spencer, not Sally. THINK ABOUT THE PROCESS OF CHARACTERISATION HERE.

She says, ‘go home. Go to bed.’

Sadly Mr A shatters the hope. He has ulterior motives. He makes a sexual advance on Holden or so it seems.

‘Goodnight handsome’
‘He didn’t give me pyjamas’
‘How’re all your women?’

Is Holden self-alienating again? Misinterpreting the situation? Running away from the grim truth?

Note he plays down the past molestations he has experienced. ‘That kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times’ [explains why he views the adultworld as so abusive. The destroyer of innocence. Clearly his innocence was lost irretrievably long ago. Mourning for this loss or the loss of his brother?]

This is part of pattern of ‘minimising speech’ in the novel.  

MINIMISATION OF LANGUAGE AS A FORM OF SELF PROTECTION. Thanks John Green.

He widely exaggerates in places but down plays in others. All part of characterising him as a confused and muddled teenager.

It is very subtle. He doesn’t confront his problems. Think about his tendency to ‘escapism’ and his unreliability as a reader. All fits in together.
He describes himself as ‘pretty run down’ at the denouement of the novel. He’s in a mental hospital. Pretty low key description, no?
Think about the anaphora of ‘sort of’.
This anaphora ‘masks the intensity of his narration’. This a COPING MECHANISM. He is grieving for is brother. Struggling with the crushing superficiality of the world around him. Drifting around New York with a bleak future. He needs all the hope he can get.

^^^ Creates distance from his problems.

What about Phoebe? His sister, in whose innocence he imbues all his hope on.

She does to a certain extent LISTEN to Holden.

‘Listen, do you want to go for a walk?’… They go for a walk. I wonder why he says to finish that’s he’s ‘so happy’. Finally someone has listened to him. In a simple way.

John Green has neat interpretation of the carousel symbol. Phoebe goes ‘around and around’ on it. Seeing this makes him so happy he’s ‘damn near bawling’. It presents symbolically a new outlook on life. Life could be circular. Like the bookend, circular structure of the novel. Life doesn’t travel away from innocence on a speedy straight line. Life could be circular, a journey to and from innocence. Does Holden achieve an epiphany here?

When considering the kids reaching for the SYMBOLIC golden rings, he says if they ‘fall off, they fall off’. Does he mean a fall from the carousel horse or from the cliff in his ‘catcher image’.

PLEASE NOTE. I USED THE FABULOUS SOURCE...'CRASHCOURSE'... I HAVE IN PLACES DIRECTLY QUOTED JOHN GREEN. I HAVE SUMMARISED HIS WORDS AND ADDED MY OWN VIEWS. THANK-YOU.