“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall. . . . The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. . . . So they gave up looking.”

Mr. Antolini is trying to catch Holden in the midst of a “fall.” But the fall Mr. Antolini describes is very different from the one Holden had imagined. Holden depicts a cliff, where children fall into a dangerous world, but Mr. Antolini's perspective depicts a free fall—giving up, disengaging himself from the world, falling in a void removed from life around him. Holden envisions himself as the protector rather than the one to be protected, he is the one who really needs to be caught.