As part of their tour of Great Britain, Teddy has been interviewed as an academic curiosity by professors of religious and philosophical studies - the "Leidekker examining group" - from various European universities in order to test his claims of advanced spiritual enlightenment.
The concepts that the preternatural child ponders are evidently derived from Zen and Vedantic religious philosophy, and suggest that Teddy possesses advanced enlightenment or God-consciousness.
Forthright and exacting, the boy questions the officer and obtains information about a shipboard word game competition - and disabuses the bemused woman as to her misapprehensions regarding his advanced intellectual development.
It contains reminders to foster better relations with his father; commentary on a letter from a Professor of Literature; a list of vocabulary words to study and notes on his meditation schedule - all matters of self-improvement.
In the opening scene set in the Mr. and Mrs. McArdle's state room, Salinger presents two facets of Zen enlightenment: "God-consciousness", a profound awareness of "inner spirit", in contrast to material concerns, and secondly, "the notion of impermanence", based on "the Vedantic belief that separate existence is an illusion.
"[9] Teddy, perched on a piece of luggage, pokes his head through the open porthole, penetrating figuratively into a zone of enlightenment and sublimity; his body remains in the cabin, where his parents – “materialistic and self-centered” – engage in mildly abusive repartee, issuing petulant and ineffectual commands to their son, who endures them with tolerant detachment.
Teddy conveys his revelation to his parents: “After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.” His mother and father, victims of their spiritual “immaturity”, are incapable of grasping his warning that they may never see him again.
[12] The same studied disengagement that characterizes Teddy’s relationship with his parents also informs the “amazing” toleration he exhibits toward his younger sister – a child that biographer Kenneth Slawenski describes as “a cruel little girl” and “perhaps the most vicious child ever discharged by Salinger’s imagination.”[13] When Booper announces that she “hates everybody in the ocean”, Salinger calls attention to the setting of his story: the sea, with its infinite horizons and indefinite boundaries where his characters drift – a seascape that reflects “the Zen and Vedantic concepts of existence.”[14] Teddy’s tolerance of his sister is due to his understanding that few reincarnations have contributed to the six-year old’s spiritual development.
Bob Nicholson, a teacher at Trinity College, Dublin, is acquainted with some members of the Leidekker group who examined Teddy; he engages the boy in an ad hoc interview.
In a lull in their exchange, Teddy becomes momentarily distracted by an inner voice or vision, and spontaneously recites to Nicholson two haiku by the 17th Century poet Bashō: “Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die” and “Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.”[19] Nicholson, pursuing Teddy to the indoor swimming pool, hears, but does not see, the event that the boy prophesied, providing the reader with tantalizing evidence that leaves the boy's ultimate fate a mystery.
This has led readers to interpret the final passage as confirmation of the boy’s premonition i.e. Booper shoves her older brother into the empty concrete pool and screams when she sees the deadly consequences.