Like a curator who preserves the artifacts in his museum, Holden Caulfield enshrines and embalms his relics -- memories -- and is none too fond of adding to his collection. If I had to come up with a broad definition to prescribe him, it’d be something in the vicinity of “cynical idealist”, because no matter how highly you are regarded by Holden, his distrust of the capriciousness that is so integral to human nature prevents you from ever completely gratifying his ideal. By far the most enduring semblance he allows himself to keep is that of his younger brother Allie. In fact, Holden mentions that he often finds himself acting 13, the age he was when his brother died, as if along with Allie, a part of him had died as well. It’s almost undeniable that Holden’s proclivity to lying compulsively is symptomatic of the PTSD triggered by his brother’s death because by lying he can gauge and manipulate his audience’s emotional responses to reflect what he wants them to feel; lying gives him control, the one thing he did not have over his brother’s fate.
I think it’s also valuable to consider that as much as Holden extols his brother’s purity and singularity, Allie may not have been so perfect after all. I’m thinking of the passage on page 206 in particular when Holden mentions that although at times he hated and complained about Stradlater and Ackley, once they were gone, he found himself missing them. This is all relative to how we prefer to remember people; when all that remains of someone are fragmented memories, the slightest courtesy we can provide is preservation of their good name.
In spite of and despite of his lying, Holden repeatedly proves his natural altruism, which is as much tied to his brother’s death than anything else. Holden is by nature distrusting and judgmental but ultimately everything he does is with good intention -- from his sympathy for the nuns to his reference to the catcher in the rye, I think what he really wants is to be for someone else what Allie was to him. Above all we can forgive Holden for his impulsiveness and dishonesty because we know that when he says he doesn't concern himself with losing things, it’s because he already suffered the worst loss possible.
