Holden Caulfield - A Nice Kid in a Cruel WorldOver the years, members of the literary community have criticized just about every author they write about. were able to put pen to paper. One of the most criticized novels was The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. In favorable reviews, Holden Caulfield is a good guy stuck in a bad world. He tries to make the most of his life, but he ends up losing that battle. While it strives for stability and truth, the adult world cannot survive without suspense and lies. It is a testament to his innocence and decent spirit that Holden would place the safety of children as a goal in his life. This only reiterates the fact that Holden is a sympathetic character, a person of high moral values ​​who is too weak to rise from a difficult situation. SN Behrman, in his review for the New Yorker, also made a scathing decision. look at Holden's personality. Behrman found Caulfield to be very self-critical, as he often calls himself a terrible liar, a madman, and an idiot. Holden is driven mad by falsity, an idea under which he groups insincerity, snobbery, injustice, insensitivity and much more. He is a prodigious worrier and someone who is quite often led to pity. Behrman wrote, "Grown men sometimes find the blazoned obscenities of life too much for them and leave this world indecently, so the fact that a 16-year-old boy is overwhelmed should not be surprising" (71). Holden is also characterized as curious and compassionate, a true moral idealist whose attitude comes from an intense hatred of hypocrisy. The novel opens in a doctor's office, where Holden is recovering from a physical illness and a mental breakdown. In Holden's fight with Stradlater, his roommate, he reveals his moral ideals: he fears his roommate's sexual motivations and he values ​​children for their sincerity and innocence, seeking 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 sum up Holden Caulfield's problems: "Like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Caulfield is in search of the Word." His problem is that of communication: as an adolescent, he simply cannot integrate into the adult world around him; through others his age" (54).