Holden Caulfield
All the disaffected teenage girls love The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield, and all the disaffected teenage boys want to be him. The good news is that while he may be on his way to becoming a grown-up crank, this prep-school refugee seems a bit too smart and self-aware to turn out like Travis Bickle. The bad news is that, by his own admission, he can’t stand other people, acts far younger than his age (which is only 17), and is having a nervous breakdown. It’s bad enough that high-school kids aspire to Holden’s level of self-destructive alienation; the many adults who hang onto him as a model of righteous rebellion seem to have missed the fact that teenage angst has an expiration date.
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