Holden Caulfield is the narrator and protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. In just a few decades, he became one of the most recognizable characters in modern literature, and one of the most imitated.
Who is he
Holden is sixteen years old and has just been expelled from Pencey Prep, yet another boarding school in his collection of school failures. He comes from a wealthy family in New York. Instead of going straight home, he decides to disappear into the city for a few days. He's intelligent, sensitive, sarcastic, and deeply alone.
The obsession with falsehood
Holden's brand is the war against phony, the false. He detects imposture in almost everyone: in the director who smiles more at his rich parents, in the vain colleague, in the actor who thinks he is. This antenna for hypocrisy is your lucidity. But it's also what isolates him, because no one passes the test, not even him, who lies and runs away all the time. Holden is an unreliable narrator: he accuses others of what he also does.
The wound underneath
Holden's key is grief. His younger brother, Allie, died of leukemia, and Holden keeps his baseball glove full of poems. Growing up would mean accepting a world where Allie died and adults pretend to be normal. His sister Phoebe, still a child, is the only person to whom Holden lets his guard down, and it is to her that he confesses to wanting to be the catcher in the rye.
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Who is Holden Caulfield?
He is the narrator and protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger. A sixteen-year-old teenager, recently expelled from high school, who wanders around New York and narrates everything in a colloquial and angry voice.
Why is Holden so angry?
Because he sees falsehood (phoniness) in adults and cannot bear to pretend together. Underneath the revolt is an unresolved grief over the death of her brother Allie and the fear of growing up in a world she considers corrupt.
Is Holden Caulfield an antihero?
He is an unreliable and contradictory narrator: he judges others to be false, but he also lies and runs away. His mixture of lucidity and fragility is what makes him so real and so imitated in literature.
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