My personal distaste of Holden as a character and why

Holden as a character is honestly quite interesting. As the book went on, my distaste of this character grew larger and larger. Now, honestly as the book went on Holden became messier of a character, but that only upped my thoughts about him. I genuinely wanted him to get some help, but it was hard to believe that with how much he kept messing up. Almost every decision he made was based on an impulse to do it without much thought given, and a lot of these ended up ending in rough scenarios. With a lot of these impulses, he also adds on uncontrollable, compulsive lying. These lies, he believes, are for the other person, when they’re honestly to give himself a bit of humor. 

He’s a very compulsive person, either making decisions without even thinking about them or lying without a reason other than he can. With his lying, he believes that he’s doing it for the other person’s sake rather than for himself. And these lies escalate quite quickly, unable to be stopped once they’re started. When he’s on the train and the woman starts talking to him, he starts telling a lie about school but doesn’t end it when the conversation continues. He instead keeps on going and adding onto it, telling her how her son who goes there is great and amazing when in reality he’s a bum (Salinger, 71). He’s leading her on, and in his mind he’s doing it for her rather than for himself. He could have stopped the lie before it escalated more, but his impulses and compulsiveness pushed him to keep doing it. He ends up escalating it to a point where if she were to find out the truth, it wouldn’t be a great situation for her.

Holden is also honestly a hater. His viewpoint on the world is so specific, and he genuinely believes he’s better than others, judging them heavily without judging himself. For instance, the scene where he’s in the Lavender Room lounge in chapter 10, he gets the sudden urge to try to get a girl. This, he believes he’d excel at and easily be able to pull at least one of them. (Salinger, 91) And in his mind that’s somewhat true. When he sees that the girls he’s eyeing are giggling at him a bit, he immediately starts thinking of them a lot more rudely, when they most likely found it a little funny that this child is trying to get them when they’re all a lot older than him. When he goes to ask them to dance and the blonde one does, she probably does it out of something like pity, when Holden doesn’t think to view it that way. And as they’re dancing and in general when he’s hanging out with them, he keeps telling us how stupid girls are and how he doesn’t like them. Which, hearing him make those comments, makes me wonder why he even tried to pull a girl in the first place if he’d just be a hater.