Bloggin' on Holden

"I wrote about my brother Allie's baseball mitt. He's dead now. You'd have liked him. He was terrifically intelligent. He was the nicest and he never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. He watched me play golf behind a fence. That's the kind of red hair he had."

I chose this scene because I feel like Allie was the only thing in Holden's life that made him happy. It seems like he doesn't really like his parents much, and he thinks that D.B. is a prostitute. The way he talks about Allie makes it seem like they were best friend. Throughout this whole part, he didn't say one swear word. This I think was a sign of being genuine. It definately got the readers attention.

He wrote about his brother's baseball glove for Stradlater's composition. When Stradlater reads this, he gets furious, and Holden just kind of brushes it off. Salinger is trying to make the reader feel sorry for him. Stradlater calls it a "goddam baseball glove" and tells Holden that he always gets things "backasswards." Holden just told us about something that meant a lot to him, and Stradlater was a total a-hole about it.