Holden Caulfield Character Sketch

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Helen Yu September 22, 2015 Period 2 Mrs. Granno Holden Caulfield Character Sketch J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye introduces Holden Caulfield as its protagonist, a judgmental and lonely teenage boy with a strong interest in sex. One of Holden's more obvious character traits that he has is how judgemental he is of almost everyone. He calls people “phonies” when he perceives them as insincere, and is extremely critical of others and tends to put people in “categories”. He has an inner code of sorts that dictates who he thinks is “genuine”, and who is a “phony”, and most people would fall under the category of “phony”. In the novel, Holden often mentions how he's “lonesome”. He always thinks of calling people when he is alone, such as when he left Pencey and the first thing he did was go to a phone booth, but almost never ends up doing so. This may be because when he does try to socialize, people are ungrateful towards him, such as when he wrote Stradlater's composition and Stradlater ended up hitting him. Holden spends a lot of time in the novel thinking about sex and trying to lose his virginity. Something that stops him from actually having sex is his high regard for women's boundaries, like when he always stops when they say “stop” even though they might not actually mean it, and when he dislikes Stradlater for taking advantage of girls. He seems to like the idea of sex more than actually having it, as he says he has trouble being intimate unless he knows the girl really well, but then he hires a hooker just to sit there and do nothing. The protagonist of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, is known for being judgemental and cynical but also lonely and
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