Holden Caulfield Quotes

In The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D Salinger, Holden Caulfield recounts his experience in New York City after his expulsion from his third school. Holden, the central character of the novel, describes all characters he meets descriptively, yet he never provides an explanation of his motives. Luckily, Holden’s personality is reflected through the various symbols throughout the novel. J.D Salinger uses symbolism to create an intimate connection to Holden’s unique emotions in an ever changing society. To begin, we first gain insight of Holden’s character through his odd taste in choice.

In the book The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden was molded into someone with a more hopeful future. He went from a life of sloth and indifference to fighting for children and generously helping save their innocence. Holden first displays the sin of sloth through all aspects of his life, especially in his schooling. He is failing four out of five of his classes. Holden is a high school student and has been expelled of four schools already for academic failure.

Holden’s environment also had an effect on his personality. Holden would move from school to school and from place to place and would not feel a thing due to the fact that he would not become attached to anything. He states “This is about the fourth school I've gone to” (Salinger 9). This illustrates how Holden moves a lot which results in detachment due to on how he will leave it eventually. Holden tries to not become attached to things because he wants to avoid the future pain of loss.

Throughout The Catcher in the Rye, Holden is searching for a girlfriend. He tries to set-up a date with several girls throughout the story, but, it never seems like he actually is trying his hardest to connect with them. This is because Jane is the girl of his dreams and the only one that he truly wants to be with but even he may not know it. Holden was very good friends with Jane Gallagher, although he never truly expressed his feelings. When Holden tried to connect with several girls throughout the book from Faith Cavendish to the hat-checker girl from the bar, he either fails horribly or he does not give it everything he has got to make his relationship with the girl work.

When two people are desperate for “interaction”, they might have a liking for each other. This is especially true if these people are acquainted with each other. This is what could happen between Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and Lee Fiora from Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld if they knew each other. As said by The Washington Post, “Holden Caulfield would love this heroine.” Holden would undoubtedly “love” Lee because of his and Lee’s neediness for sex.

In this excerpt from the beginning of the novel called The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, the main character, Holden Caulfield speaks to his psychologist about his deceased younger brother. Salinger includes this quote from Holden in order to offer the reader some understanding of his actions and attitude throughout the book, and it also enforces the thought that Holden is a character struggling with teen grief, misunderstood by his parents and the peers around him. In this quote, he seems to be lost in thought of the detail of his younger brother's baseball mitt, even remembering the "green ink" (Salinger) that was used on it. Because of this, readers can infer that Holden has spent much time with this mitt and that such an object has a great amount of sentimental value to him because it was a possession of a person that he cared greatly about. However, despite his pain, Holden does not allow himself to process his grief properly; he instead puts up a sort of facade of passiveness towards the death of younger brother.

J.D. Salinger depicts his character, Holden Caulfield, as a young man with strong moral convictions. Throughout The Catcher in the Rye, Holden constantly comes face to face with situations that test the moral fiber of his character. Each time a challenge presents itself, he does what he feels to be decent and right. His respect for women and intimate relationships comes to light when he confronts his roommate, Stradlater, for disrespecting Jane, Stradlater 's date and Holden 's friend (56-59). He visits his sick professor because he respects the professor’s loyalty to his students (6).

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all.

Salinger vs. Caulfield: An Analysis When I was a freshman in highschool, I decided to read The Catcher in the Rye for an outside reading assignment for my english class. Initially, I picked the book because I read that the main character had a little sister named Phoebe. I ordered a copy online and I fell in love with the revolutionary coming-of-age novel. I've done an assignment over the book at least once every year throughout my high school career.

You can easily relate “Creep” by Radiohead to Holden Caulfield and his pessimistic attitude towards everything and everybody in the book. Wherever Holden goes, he constantly refers to people as “phonies”, without even speaking a word to them. He is very critical and hold high standards for not only other individuals, but of himself as well. His low self-esteem is quite apparent from all the negative comments he makes throughout the text. In my honest opinion, I think Holden puts others down as a way to make himself feel better about the bad in his own life.