Name: Holden Caulfield
Age: 16
Physical Features: At six feet, two-and-a-half inches, he is tall for his age and already has some gray hair.
Personality: He himself admits that he acts more like a 13-year-old than an adult. Naive, childish, depressing and resentful to adult life. Thinks he himself is dumb. Secretly intelligent.
Quotes: “Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
(Holden doesn't want things to change and he can't get over Allie's death.)
“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.”
(Holden acknowledges that he lies a lot and he's not very honest about his feelings.)
“Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”
(Holden still can't get over Allie's death and can't see why it's significant to place flowers on the dead. He doesn't get the true meaning.)
“People always clap for the wrong things.”
(I think Holden is just jealous...)
“What I really felt like, though, was committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window. I probably would've done it, too, if I'd been sure somebody'd cover me up as soon as I landed. I didn't want a bunch of stupid rubbernecks looking at me when I was all gory.”
(Holden is depressed and would have jumped out of a window if he didn't know what a person that fell from a window would look like.)
“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”
(Holden... You're a moron.)
“Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”
(Holden's just a big baby. He just can't grow up...)
“Sleep tight, ya morons!”
(Holden said this when he left Pency. He really is a baby...)
“Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them-especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.”
(Once again, Holden can't accept that Allie is dead. He's trying to hold on to him the best he can... Holden needs to accept things as they are, thats the only way move on.)
Dream: “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”