Chapter 7 and 8 Summary

Chapter 7: In this chapter Holden talks to Ackley for a while, and tries to sleep in Ackley's room. He cant sleep because he constantly has to think about what Stradlater and Jane are doing. He gets so annoyed by not being able to fall asleep, and Ackley's phoniness, that he decides to leave for New York already a few days earlier than planned. He plans to stay there undercover for a few days until his parents got his report card. He leaves through the hallway and says “Sleep tight, ya morons!”, and then leaves Pencey forever.

Chapter 8: Holden walks to the train station and catches a train to New York. On it, he meets the mother of a fellow student called Ernst Morrow. He tells lies about how good and famous he is, and that he would have been the new class president if he wouldn't be so shy and tell everyone to not vote him. He says this because he thinks that this will make a mother proud. When she asks him for his name and why he is leaving so early from Pencey, he says that his name is Rudolph Schmidt, and that he is leaving to New York to get a brain tumor operation.