Holden Caulfield
Holden really made the book. If it was another guy or girl, I don’t think it would have mattered; the book would have probably been very boring and a disaster. This book would not be interesting if it didn’t have Holden as the main character. J.D. Salinger, really gives readers a different character then they are probably used too. J.D. Salinger, the author of the Catcher in the Rye, gives a wonderful personality to Holden from the way he thinks, acts, and speaks in his life. He is also given an interesting background of what he has gone through
The number of readers who have been able to relate with Holden and make him their hero is truly overwhelming. Something about his discontent, and his vivid way of expressing it, makes him resonate powerfully with readers who come from backgrounds completely different from his. It is tempting to inhabit his point of view and revel in his hostile rather than try to deduce what is wrong with him. The obvious signs that Holden is a troubled and unreliable narrator are manifold: he fails out of four schools; he manifests complete apathy toward his future; he is hospitalized, and visited by a psychoanalyst, for an unspecified complaint; and he is unable to connect with other people. We know of two traumas in his past that clearly have something to do with his emotional state: the death of his brother Allie and the suicide of one of his schoolmates. But, even with that knowledge, Holden’s peculiarities cannot simply be explained away as symptoms of a readily identifiable disorder.
The most noticeable of Holden’s peculiarities is how extremely judgmental he is of almost everything and everybody. He criticizes and philosophizes about people who are boring, people who are insecure, and, above all, people who are phony. Holden carries this tendency for passing judgment to such an extreme that it often becomes extremely funny, such as when he speculates that people are so rude that someone will probably write...