How Does Holden Affect The Catcher In The Rye

Holden Caulfield is a sixteen-year old boy that hates a lot of things. He attends a school named Pencey where he got kicked out because he had very poor grades. The only class he actually likes is English class. He doesn’t care that he got kicked out because he thinks that a bunch of “phonies” go to that school anyways. In J.D Salinger’s novel the Catcher in the Rye, Holden is affected by his two brothers Allie, and D.B. At the beginning of the story Holden mentions his brother D.B and explains how he moved to Hollywood to write and make productions. D.B visits Holden all the time, almost every week, and owns a jaguar that cost “damn near four thousand bucks.” D.B also wrote a “terrific book” that contained many short stories and had Holden’s favorite story, the Secret Goldfish. Holden is affected by his brother D.B because he was the first person that was mentioned in the story out of his family members. This means that he’s one of the most important persons of his life if he took the time to explain who he was and what he did.

It was significant because it reminded Holden of his brother. Allie had died from leukemia when he was eleven. This affected Holden by making him break the garage windows and causing him to break his hand, he also wanted to “break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken.” If Allie would of never died then Holden would of never had broken the windows in the garage. Furthermore, if he didn’t die the glove wouldn’t mean have as much significance as it does now, and if it wasn’t significant then he wouldn’t have wrote the composition for Stradlater on the glove and Holden wouldn’t have gotten angry about