JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield is to the 20th century what Huckleberry Finn is to the 19th: the unforgettably haunting voice of the adolescent at odds with a troubling world. Holden, the opposite of Huck, is an unhappy rich boy who has done a bunk from his posh secondary school, Pencey Prep, in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. He begins his first-person narrative in words that echo the famous opening of Twain’s novel (No 23 in this series), a frank disavowal of “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”.
Holden declares that he isn’t going to tell us “about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down”. Actually, that’s just what he does, writing (apparently in retrospect from California) about three days in December 1949 when, having been chastised by his school “for not applying myself”, he plays truant over a long and memorable weekend in Manhattan. Holden is tortured by the battle to come to terms with himself, with his little sister Phoebe, and their dead brother Allie. Like many adolescents, he feels that the world is an alien, hostile and comfortless place run by “phonies”.
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