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Catcher In The Rye Character Development Essay

893 Words4 Pages

People around us has a great influence on the formation of our character. The main personage of the novel Catcher in the rye by J. D. Salinger is a seventeen-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, who appears to be very depressed and lonely. Due to his mental state he failed his exams, again got knocked out from another school, and quarreled with some mates. Through the pages of the novel we saw that Holden was trying to make good relationships with family members and some acquaintances, but at the same time, he pushed them away due to his behavior. He really loved his family, especially his younger brother and sister. Holden’s character development has been influenced by his family and what has happened in his younger years. When Holden was thirteen, his family lost Allie, who died from leukemia. Holden was angry and felt a pain due to this loss because he loved his younger brother and actually idealized him. “He stated, ‘It wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member of the family...He was also nicest, in lots of ways...He never got mad at anybody’ ” (Salinger 38). When Holden got the news about his brother’s death, he became mad. At that moment he was in the garage and started to crash all around himself, which led to the hospitalization because he broke his arm. “He stated, ‘I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the …show more content…

After the D.B.’s departure, he started to trust people less and to be opened to them. Holden got depressed and mentally unstable, because of Allie’s death. And Phoebe was the one who filled his life with sense, and who supported him. She was like his “catcher in the rye”: convinced him to refuse the thoughtless action of leaving the town, that could ruin his future life. I believe that each person got influenced by his family or by people around him in some way, and it can be not only a positive impact on him but also a negative

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