Microblog Memes

I read it as a young adult after hearing several others online say it was their favorite book or strongly impacted them. I thought Holden was a whiny kid who did need help, but also really lacked personal accountability for someone who dedicated so much time to calling others phonies. That's ok, of course. Protagonists should be at least somewhat flawed, and it's especially reasonable if they are in the process of growing up.

But I mainly hated the narrative structure. I'm just going off of what I remember for all this, but it seemed like Holden just wandered between a series of significant encounters for the entire story without anything going anywhere. Other than >!the sister and a second encounter with the nuns,!< the characters were just discarded shortly after being introduced. Any scene could have been a good foundation for the rest of the story's development, but he just wanders somewhere else before all but the barest of conflict resolution happens. IIRC the furthest we got was at the end where >!he gets the idea to leave society behind, but his sister says she would miss him and asks him not to, so he just says "ok"!<. It felt like the entire story was the author just pranking the audience about potential character development before yoinking it away with a laugh.