The Catcher in the Rye - Sally Hayes

Sally Hayes is dim person whose phoniness blinds her from Holden's cries for help and dismisses him when he needs her most, her phoniness changes Holden and he himself is forced into bad decisions because of it.

When Holden is waiting for Sally in the lobby of New York's Biltmore Hotel, the place is filled with girls his age, and he's watching them. "[I]t was sort of depressing" (123), thinking about what's going to happen to most of the girls he sees. They're all going to have conventional lives, he thinks, married to boring men. However, Holden later decides that life with a bore might not be so bad after all. At least a bore has control and a plan for his life, something he sees as admirable in Sally and a wish for himself. However, when "Sally started coming up the stairs, and [Holden] started down to meet her" (124) it represents the relationship between the two, Holden is always taking those few steps down as to not make Sally look dumb and she must always go the extra mile to show him how intelligent she can be. This relationship is highlighted during the intermission of the play when Sally is always looking around to find someone that she knows, as if she is trying to prove that she has intelligent "[s]trictly Ivy League" (127) friends.

"I'm crazy," (125) Holden says, "a madman"(134). Of course, he means these statements as figures of speech, but they still indicate that he has some idea that he's behaving erratically. Sally suggests that they go ice-skating that is where Holden's troubles begin coming to a head, uncharacteristically he's willing to see himself, and not the rest of the world, as the problem. "I don't get hardly anything out of anything," he cries. "I'm in bad shape. I'm in lousy shape." (131) Unlike his use of "crazy" and "madman" earlier, this is no figure of speech for Holden. He's serious, he's admitting he's in trouble, and he's asking Sally to help him. However, Sally Hayes is the last person who might be willing to help him. She hardly understands most of what he's saying to her, despite her feeble attempts. Holden makes the further mistake of asking her to come live in the woods with him. Her response would be funny if Holden's condition weren't so serious. As he has done all along, he's trying to reach out to someone.