Holden Caulfield is teen angst bullshit with a pickaxe. He’s sarcastic, nasty, and completely unlikeable. He also doesn’t give a shit. He is every teenager caught between the shitty little games of high school (“you’re supposed to kill yourself if the football team loses or something”) and the fear of adulthood (“going to get an office job and make a lot of money like the rest of the phonies”).
By being the pissed off, nasty, cynical insane bastard; Holden Caulfield suggests that it is ok to be a shit. Your criticisms of the world are not invalid and nothing you say or think is so bad that you need to repress it. Ironically, this is not only something that is essential to survival but is also the key to ultimately becoming a decent caring human being. No one can grow up if they don’t deal with the awful side of themselves that hates everything. To repress it, is to give it power. To let it out to play is to learn to control that side.
”As a bank teller, you learn some important lessons. These include:
Four years ago, a customer named Charles was hit by a drunk driver and pronounced dead. Then he magically managed to not be dead anymore and was in a coma for an undisclosed period of time. Every single time he comes into the bank, he reminds us that he was in a coma four years ago. “I was in a coma four years ago.”
Charles is nearly fifty years old, a rather large man with a great big grin on his face. The first time I waited on him, he apologized for being confusing, adding that he was in a coma four years ago. Now, head trauma patients can have difficulties filtering what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate to say. So, the second time I waited on him, he declared to me “I like you! I wish you were older so I could date you!”
Today as I was helping him, he asked me, “So, do you like older guys?” Fortunately my assistant manager came to my rescue.
“Hello, Charles!” she greeted him. He insisted that she not call him Charles, he hates that name and prefers Chuckie.
“Oh, like the movie, that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid!” she replied.
“Yeah, Chuckie! I even got a tattoo of him, because I came back from the dead, just like him!” Charles turned around and his barely-there tank top failed to conceal the second most retarded tattoo I have ever seen in my life, #1 being a tattoo of Tweety Bird standing in front of the American flag which one of my former coworkers wears proudly on her shoulder.