“Raise your hand if you liked Holden.”

I raise my hand halfway, because I sit in the front of the class, and I can’t see how many people agree with me, but then I check those behind me, and still I had it raised higher than anyone else. The consensus reached, the vitriol starts flowing. They hate his speech, they hate his hypocrisy. He was entitled, privileged, self-centered. Holden Caulfield was a teenager. He was imperfect. He was confused and vulnerable and lost in a world that fundamentally did not care about him.

And this is why I love him.

The Catcher in the Rye is a book written about a teenager, which makes it to an extent a book written for teenagers. And in this regard, it is necessarily a story about uncertainty. Holden doesn’t know what he’s feeling. He doesn’t know who he is. He’s just seen his future and seen the world into which he was born, and it makes him sad. Not lonely, not melancholy, not depressed, not disappointed, not disaffected, just sad. In fact, throughout the entire novel this distinct sense of sadness lingers like an old friend whose name you’ve forgotten.

Holden is afraid for his sister. He is afraid that she’ll grow up, and stop being the person he loves. Growing up necessarily requires self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness forces you to consciously represent yourself. A young child doesn’t know what sort of impression she makes on someone. A young child just behaves as she will, without knowing where she’s going, and because of this, she is unable to lie. Holden’s constant refrain throughout the novel, phony, is his cry for a return to consciouslessness. When people grow up, they begin lying. They begin to be the facade of a person they put up, rather than the genuine individual they used to be.

The greek myth of Narcissus begins with a prophecy: He will live a long life, so long as he does not know himself. Narcissus goes through life without self-knowledge. He scorns lover after lover, because who they love is his face. His facade. Until one day he looks upon the still waters of a pool, and sees his reflection in the image. He stays there, admiring himself, because he does not know that that face, that facade, is what his scorned lovers fell in love with. Narcissus had not seen himself, and then he had, and obsession with his appearance, maintenance of the facade, became everything.

Holden is that prophet. Holden is Narcissus. Holden has no self-knowledge and is terrified that others will see themselves in the pool and be lost forever, daisies lining the shore. Holden is afraid of talking to people because he doesn’t want to hear them lie. Narcissus was not a good person before he was enchanted, but he was an honest one.

Holden’s tragedy, and the tragedy of self-consciousness, is that he cannot become ensnared by the facade, but he also cannot be protected by it. He is who he is, no editing, no manipulation, and because of that, those around him will hate him. They will be repulsed by him, scorn him, because his facade is untailored. The people around him, they can’t see his story. They don’t know why he is the way he is, and Holden can’t tell them. Without a facade, the only thing that reveals to you Holden’s character is the story he tells. His story, his voice, contains within it the hints of who he is. He’s telling us: “Listen, this is me.” No post-processing; no do-overs.

Most everyone in my English class disliked Holden, but I love him. If you can read Holden’s story as his representation of himself, then you can’t help but to love him. If you could read everyone’s story, as consciousless and unfiltered as his, you couldn’t help but to love everyone. You’d love them as the child inside: imperfect, rough, beautiful. The true story of who we are is the true story of why we deserve love. The only tragedy is how rarely we write the true story of who we are.