One Character: Holden Caulfield

Walking in to Barnes & Noble a week before the start of my junior year, I felt the same, dark, familiar pit in my stomach hollowing out a home as my mind was forced to face the realization at hand; my summer reading was due in a week, and I hadn’t even started the book.  I walked out of the store, a copy of Catcher in the Rye in my hand and a look of pure disgust on my face, already convinced that this book that had stolen my last taste of freedom would indisputably be, at the risk of sounding like a four year old, the stupidest thing I would ever lay eyes on. I went home and procrastinated a few more days, but nearly a week later when asked why I didn’t just stop reading, I surprised myself by answering honestly, “I can’t”.

The thing is, it wasn't the magnificent writing style of J.D. Salinger, or the original yet complex coming of age plot that had me hooked, but rather the characterization and resulting narration of the protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Maybe it was because Salinger had used himself for the character’s mold, or maybe it was because I had spent my summer reading mind-numbing chick-lits, but somehow I had found a dynamic in the character of Holden that I had never found in a character before: desperation. The candidness of the narrator spoke to me in ways that no other novel ever had. Through the means of Holden Caulfield, Salinger puts on a page the words that so many are afraid to express themselves: the desire to run away, the distaste of everyone around you, the disturbance of feeling like a prisoner in your own body. It was so clear to me that Holden was trying so hard to grasp at some sense of happiness that he lost his footing all together. The display of his steady downfall was heartbreaking, humbling, and most of all, honest.

Once I read Holden's struggles  it was like all these other characters were insignificant,  like their simplicity and boldness were too outright and mainstream. I started to search for something that could give me a connection to, hope for, sympathy towards, anything like the experience that was mine while reading Catcher in the Rye. I found myself throwing down easy reads for something with more substance. In the most frustrating way, Holden Caulfield has taught me to desire good literature in ways that none of my English teachers ever could.

My peers can criticize the snobbishness of him all they want, and my English teacher can say that Holden’s “the biggest phony of them all” until he’s blue in the face, but one thing remains certain; in my mind, Holden Caulfield is the greatest flaw to have ever graced the pages of American literature.