Teddy

“Teddy” is a short story by American author J. D. Salinger, first published in The New Yorker in 1953 and later included in Salinger’s short story collection Nine Stories. “Teddy” is told in objective third-person perspective, following the titular Teddy on an ocean liner returning to America from London, who claims to be a reincarnated Indian man—one rumored to know when and where a person will die. It explores spiritual enlightenment, death, and loss of innocence.

Salinger is best known for his coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, which explores teenage disenfranchisement in America after World War II. Critics consider Salinger one of the most influential writers in America, with Catcher in the Rye having sold more than 65 million copies.

This guide refers to the 2019 e-book version of Nine Stories.

“Teddy” takes place on an ocean liner returning to America from London. It opens with Teddy’s father Mr. McArdle, a voice actor, reprimanding him for standing on his expensive Gladstone suitcase to look out the porthole of his parents’ cabin room aboard the ocean liner. Mr. McArdle is in bed, sunburned and smoking. A disheveled Teddy ignores his father’s suggestion to wear his dog tags, and his mother tells him to stay on the suitcase. Teddy’s parents proceed to bicker: Mr. McArdle says he’d like to “kick [her] head in” (123), and Mrs. McArdle says he’s going to have a heart attack someday (123). During this exchange, Teddy notices someone dumped a “whole garbage can of orange peels out the window” and into the water (125). He realizes if he hadn’t seen the floating peels, he wouldn’t have known they existed.

Mrs. McArdle instructs Teddy to find his sister Booper, since the siblings have a swimming lesson at 10:30 am. Mr. McArdle tells Teddy to retrieve the filmless Leica camera that he lent Booper. Teddy leaves his parents’ room, rejecting his mother’s request for a kiss and thinking about being “an orange peel” that “only [exists] in the minds of all [his] acquaintances” (126). He finds Booper on the Sports Deck playing with shuffleboard tiles, accompanied by a boy named Myron. She bullies Myron, whose father was killed in Korea, and calls him “stupid” for not knowing a child without parents is called an orphan. After claiming giants could climb the ship’s smokestack and kill passengers by throwing shuffleboard tiles at them, she explains how someone could kill their parents by feeding them poisoned marshmallows. Teddy tells Booper to bring the Leica camera to their mother. It is 10 o’clock in the morning, time for him to write in his diary. He instructs Booper to meet him at the pool at 10:30 am. As he leaves, she exclaims she hates everyone.

On the crowded Sun Deck, Teddy takes out his diary and reads the most recent entry—a to-do list which includes meditation. He writes a new entry, which lists the recipients of his morning letters, and then he writes, “It will either happen today or February 14, 1958 when I am sixteen. It is ridiculous to mention even” (132). Bob Nicholson, a professor and passenger who spoke to Teddy the previous day, has been observing him from the Sports Deck and finally speaks to him. Nicholson is curious about his colleagues in the Leidekker Examining Group, who studied and recorded tapes of Teddy. Teddy asks if he’s a poet, and says poets are “always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions” (135). He keeps looking up at the Sports Deck and suddenly quotes two Japanese poems, one of which states, “Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die” (135). He doesn’t understand why people think it’s important to be emotional, and when Nicholson asks if he loves God, he replies he does—but not sentimentally. Teddy asks for the time, and when Nicholson says it’s 10:10 am, Teddy says they can enjoy their conversation for 10 more minutes. He claims he acquires information through meditation, having once been an Indian man, disgraced by a former lover. As punishment, he was reincarnated as an American man.

In discussing religion, Teddy pushes back against Nicholson’s logic, as it must be let go to meditate and leave the finite dimension. Nicholson asks if he accurately predicted where and when the Leidekker Examining Group would die, and Teddy claims he only told them where they should exercise caution. He scorns the religion and philosophy professors, saying “they’re still pretty afraid to die” (140). He asks Nicholson if he knows the biblical Adam and Eve, who lost their innocence to knowledge. Teddy himself is unafraid of death, as he sees it as detaching from one’s body. He then describes his own potential death in detail: “I could go downstairs to the pool, and there might not be any water in [the pool]. […] [M]y sister might come up and sort of push me in. I could fracture my skull and die instantaneously” (141). He tries to leave the conversation to attend his swimming lesson, but Nicholson asks what he thinks of the education system. Teddy says he would teach children how to meditate and reject logic, not memorize the names of things. Nicholson worries this would make children “ignoramuses.”

Teddy hurries away, and the narrative shifts to Nicholson, sitting alone. He finishes smoking, seems to realize something, and then hurries to the pool. The story ends when he is almost to the pool, and he hears “an all-piercing, sustained scream—clearly coming from a small, female child” (143).