Holden Caulfield - A Nice Kid in a Cruel World Over the years, members of the literary community have criticized nearly every author they could put their pen to . One of the most popular and criticized novels was The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. In favorable reviews, Holden Caulfield is a good guy stuck in a bad world. He's trying to make the best of his life, even if he ultimately loses that battle. While he strives for stability and truth, the adult world cannot survive without suspense and lies. It is a testament to his innocence and respectable spirit that Holden has made the safety of children his life's goal. This only serves to reiterate the fact that Holden is a sympathetic character, a person of high moral values ​​who is too weak to get up from a difficult situation. Even SN Behrman, in his review for The New Yorker, took a scathing look at Holden's personality. Behrman found Caulfield to be very self-critical, as he often calls himself a terrible liar, a madman, and a moron. Holden is driven mad by falsehood, an idea under which he groups insincerity, snobbery, injustice, insensitivity and much more. He is a prodigious worrier and someone who is moved to pity quite often. Behrman wrote, “Grown men sometimes find the emblazoned obscenities of life too much for them and leave this world indecorously, so the fact that a 16-year-old boy is overwhelmed should not be surprising” (71). Holden is also labeled as curious and compassionate, a true moral idealist whose attitude stems from an intense hatred of hypocrisy. The novel opens in a doctor's office, where Holden is recovering from a physical illness and a nervous breakdown. In Holden's fight with Stradlater, his roommate, he reveals his moral ideals: he fears his roommate's sexual motivations and appreciates children for their sincerity and innocence, trying to protect them from the false society of adults. Jane Gallagher and Allie, Holden's younger brother who died at age 11, represent his eternal symbols of goodness (Davis 317). A quote from Charles Kegel seems to adequately summarize Holden Caulfield's problems: "Like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus A portrait of the artist as a young man, Caulfield is searching for the Word. His problem is one of communication: as a teenager, he simply cannot enter the adult world that surrounds him, as a sensitive teenager through other peers" (54).