Holden Caulfield

Holden Caulfield is the narrator and protagonist of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951. A sixteen-year-old who has just been expelled from his fourth prep school, Holden narrates several days he spends wandering alone through New York City before returning home, avoiding his parents while drifting through hotels, bars and encounters with old friends, strangers and his younger sister Phoebe, whom he confides in most honestly. Cynical, alienated and deeply distrustful of what he repeatedly calls the phoniness of the adult world, Holden is nonetheless shown to be grieving the earlier death of his younger brother Allie and struggling with a depression and instability the novel only gradually reveals, including a framing device suggesting he is narrating from a psychiatric facility. Holden's title comes from his fantasy of standing in a field of rye, catching children before they fall off a cliff into adulthood, an image of his own wish to protect innocence from a corrupting world. Holden Caulfield became one of the twentieth century's most influential literary emblems of adolescent alienation.