Holden Caulfield is the protagonist of JD Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye. He is a 16-year-old antihero who is kicked out of his prep school and spends two days in New York. Caulfield is an unreliable narrator and an alienated, disillusioned, and cynical character. He is both controversial and memorable, inspiring both positive and negative reactions.
Holden Caulfield is the main character in JD Salinger’s famous Bildungsroman, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). He is both an antihero, a protagonist with qualities at odds with the stereotypically ‘heroic’ image, and an everyman, whose experiences are to some extent ‘universal’, at least in his respective culture. Caulfield also appears in some of Salinger’s short stories, although he is best known as the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye.
At the time of the events in the book, most of which last two days, Holden Caulfield is 16 years old. The novel takes place just before winter break, and he is kicked out of his prep school. He leaves school a day early and spends two days in New York without telling anyone where he is, although he secretly meets his little sister twice during the novel. At the end of the novel, Caulfield decides to hitchhike west, and it is implied that he is telling the story from a mental institution in California.
Caulfield is an unreliable narrator, a literary device in which the narrator is contradictory and the reader cannot take his words literally. In Catcher in the Rye, he rails against “faking” and what he sees as threats to innocence, embodied by his younger sister Phoebe, but he’s hardly a role model in any of those respects. His moral standards are incredibly high, but he doesn’t apply them to himself. Throughout the novel, he emerges as an alienated, disillusioned and cynical character.
Holden Caulfield is both one of the most memorable characters in American fiction and one of the most controversial. As an anti-hero, he is similar to Travis Bickle in the 1976 film Taxi Driver. Both of these characters served as inspirations for famous killers, and The Catcher in the Rye was often banned due to fears that it glorified delinquency and a deranged personality. Many people have been inspired by the character in a more positive sense, however, and he is referenced in countless works of art, from literature and television to rock music and cartoons.
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