I read it in school and have read it since, and read a good deal of other stuff besides, and now I have very little patience with Holden. I think it's something to do with how Salinger seems to think that Holden really knows something very valuable, whereas he just strikes me as very young and very ignorant. He's quite proud of how much he hates 'phoney' people, and yet he has very little tolerance for anyone he thinks is actually phoney. I get the impression that Salinger has a lot of admiration for Holden, if only because Holden narrates the whole book and there's nobody else there to comment on him, and yet I find Holden to be just a narrow-minded, priggish, self-pitying little squit.
Not that teenagers aren't like that, I was like that myself. The good thing about the book is how accurate it is. But it's not the guide to life that some of its fans think it is. Holden is somebody you have to grow out of being like.
2007-02-10
13:09:17
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13 answers
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Anonymous