Teacher's £30,000 for 'love song to youth'

Critics are split between maintaining that Holden has been emotionally and psychologically frozen at the moment of Allie's death years before, rendering him a kind of infant-adolescent, and claiming that he is actually more similar to an adult than to an adolescent. It would be most accurate to say that Holden is teetering on the edge of adulthood, suspended between the two states and not firmly on either side. He is overwhelmed and emotional, much like a teenager - but he is also incisiveAnalytical and clear-thinking. , cynical and intuitive, suggesting a maturity beyond his years. Whilst the protagonists of young adult fiction usually go through some kind of epiphany, Holden remains much the same throughout the novel, with the same fears, attitudes and sensitivities, suggesting that at a minimum he is developing in a non-linear manner.

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Holden's younger brother, Allie, who died from leukaemiaCancer of the white blood cells. , is a towering character in the book despite his non-presence. One critic describes Allie as "constituting [Holden's] emotional frame of reference", along with his beloved sister Phoebe and his love interest Jane Gallagher (who also never appears physically in the narrative). Holden references Allie often, seeming to be experiencing feelings analogousSomething that is similar to another thing. to survivor's guiltA feeling of guilt for surviving a life-threatening situation whilst others did not. as he reiterates often how far superior his brother was to himself, describing him as "fifty times as intelligent". He is also keen for the reader to understand the greatness of Allie's loss, telling us "you'd have liked him". For many readers, grief is at the core of The Catcher in the Rye, engendering Holden's profound existential shock, hypersensitivity, and feelings of isolation.

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Holden's emotions are punishing, inhibitively strong, and often self-inflicted. His imagination runs wild, creating torturous images of his friend Stradlater canoodling with Jane Gallagher and creating resentment towards people he perceives as "phonies". Many have compared Salinger's protagonist to Shakespeare's Hamlet, an "intuitive moral genius" distinguished for his sentimentalism, paralysing emotional feeling and sense that his emotions isolate him from others.

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Holden's feelings of isolation pursue him throughout the novel. He alienates himself from some characters, like Sally Hayes and Carl Luce, very deliberately - but for the most part finds himself simply unable to relate to the people around him. The only people he connects with deeply are his dead brother, his unreachable love interest Jane, and his sister Phoebe who, though precociousWhen a child shows mental development or maturity at an unusually young age. , is 10 years old and unlikely to significantly identify with his feelings.

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Innocence, and the loss of innocence, are taken by many to be the primary preoccupation of The Catcher in the Rye. They link a lot of Holden's emotional outbursts, from his effusiveGushing or unrestrained gratitude or joy. joy at seeing the childlike Phoebe riding a carousel to his desperate obliteration of an expletive written in graffiti outside Phoebe's school. The central metaphor, Holden's desire to be a "catcher in the rye" who saves children from falling off a cliff edge, is seen by most critics as a metaphor for the baptism of fire into adulthood - a forceful but inevitable loss of innocence. Holden's sympathies also lie with people who retain their innocence and compassion, like Mr Antolini, whom he fondly remembers picking up a boy who had jumped from a window with his own coat, remarking that "he didn't even give a damn if his coat got all bloody." Meanwhile, his dislike of "phonies" springs from a disdain for people who have learned that life is easier when performed, rather than honestly undertaken.

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