Holden Caulfield— I. Can't. Even.

 

Holden Caulfield, from The Catcher In The Rye, is the most annoying character in fiction.

It’s like Caillou grew up to be a teenage boy attending an uppity prep school in the Northeast. No one thought Caillou could get any more whiny and annoying, but he did. The book follows Holden as he's on holiday from his prep school in Pennsylvania and journeys to New York City where he bounces around from person to person telling the reader how horrible and annoying everyone else is. After several chance encounters with various interesting, yet annoying people, he reconnects with a girl he’s dated before, a girl he describes with disgust and describes as being a phony. They go out on the town, only he acts like a creepo, ranting about the ills of society and then suddenly asking her to run away with him. Only that’s her cue to run away “from him” and naturally, he thinks she’s the problem. Later he hires a prostitute who arrives at his hotel room assuming she’s there for sex when he just wants to talk. He doesn’t understand what her problem is and ends up getting in a dust-up with her pimp, who ends up punching Holden in the groin—I was totally rooting for the pimp at this point. I remember this being the part of the story when I looked up and questioned my life choices. The Catcher In The Rye was not the book for me. I think it is the first book I ever quit reading. I eventually could not continue with Holden, so I ran away like his date did. 

I initially chose to read the book because I wanted to read a teen classic. The character of Holden Caulfield is well known in literary circles as the quintessential rebellious teen and he is always described as being depressed. Though I am not a psychiatrist, I would not give him that diagnosis. Holden is just an incredibly difficult person to be around. I'll throw out "oppositional defiant disorder" and if critics agree they should update their diagnosis. 

Despite my disdain for the book, a part of me still wants to know what happened in the end. An ever-present dramatic cloud over the story is that when Holden left his prep school for a school holiday he was failing his classes and his parents did not know about his academic woes. His parents are always MIA in the book. Perhaps they moved and left no forwarding address for Holden. That seems like an appropriate end to the story.