The Catcher in the Rye

Sixteen years old, expelled from his fourth school, narrating from a California rest home. Holden is the most influential confessional narrator in American literature and also the most comprehensively unreliable. He tells us he's 'inclined to reserve all judgments' (that's Fitzgerald's Nick, actually), then calls almost everyone he meets a phony. He says he doesn't like most people, then describes them in loving detail. He says he hates what Stradlater represents, then admits Stradlater is good-looking and that his jacket fits him well. The gap between what Holden claims and what he reveals is the novel's engine. His defining wound is Allie's death — his younger brother died of leukemia, and Holden's response was to punch out all the garage windows with his bare fist. He still has the scars. He will always have the scars.