Holden Caulfield from “The Catcher in The Rye” Essay

â€Å"The Catcher in the Rye† the reader can see the world through his eyes as he is the one narrating the story in first person. Holden is a young teenager, the age of sixteen who is emotionally disturbed and confused boy who is entering the journey of adulthood. Holden is a typical teenager who is rather irritated and disgusted by the society that surrounds him. To me he comes across as a witty individual because of the way he makes fun of, as he likes to call it the â€Å"phony† people in society he comes across with in the novel. He is from a family formed of two parents who seem to be quite wealthy, as they live in an expensive part of New York most people have to be wealthy to live in New York. Holden also was two bothers, D.B. and Allie, Allie whom is dead at the age of thirteen and he has a younger sister Phoebe. During the novel we discover that Holden is rather depressed young man because of his past, with the death of his brother and the failings of his grades in the recent schools he has attended to, he has become unhappy which leads him to have a breakdown. It seems that Holden is very dissatisfied with life and has never had any help during his time of confusion so I figure he is rather week and in some parts of the novel he feels like committing suicide. Holden has a huge sense of moral values, which often seems to interfere with other people’s loss of values. Because of other peoples values he gets frustrated and thinks people are â€Å"phony†. Holden seems to be a rather mean person as you read his feelings and how he feels towards people but it is only what he thinks. When Holden does something wrong he feels really guilty about his behavior and it often eats him up inside. Like the time when he went out with Sally Hayes and he calls her â€Å"a pain in the ass† when she refuses to run away with him, after he feels really guilty and can barely stop thinking about it. He is also a person who can’t get things out of his mind when things bother him like when Ward Stradlater goes out with his old girlfriend Jane Gallagher; throughout the novel he thinks about it a lot and wonders how the date went. Holden hates the movies and loves books. Holden behavior while he is in New York going to bars and meeting women he acts like a adult by smoking and drinking, but he is very critical to others that live that kind of lifestyle. It would be rather hard to see myself as Holden or even acting like him even for a day because I’m very different from him and I’m not as critical towards people as he is. I think it would be difficult to be friends with him because I would always be wondering what he is thinking about me and usually when he does think of someone it is always in a negative way. But still it was easy to identify him because I have friends that are sort of like him and they act the same way.