Joe Luckey
August 28, 2008
Junior Theology

Was Holden Caulfield a Person of Faith? Holden Caulfield, showing little or no confidence in himself, or in anyone else for that matter, was not a person of faith. Showing his faith towards other people was a big problem for Holden. Sure, some of the people the he revealed no faith to were, on the surface, bad people, like Stradlatter, but I believe that Holden was too quick to judge people. Take Ackley as another example. Holden disliked and repeatedly said that he hated Ackley because he has “awful teeth and pimples” and various other reasons that had nothing to do with Ackley's personality. More importantly, though, Holden did not have faith in himself. He found himself on the verge of mental breakdowns, such as when he was walking through the streets of downtown New York near the end of the book. He has little faith in the way that he has treated his sister over the years, since he has been away at school for so long. He has had such little faith in himself that he can not stay at the same school for an extended period of time. Almost every class he fails, because he has no faith in the way that he does his school work. Now, if there was a second Catcher in the Rye, and it spoke of things after his childhood, I think that my opinion would change as to whether he is a person of faith or not. Towards the end of the novel, Holden begins to realize what has been happening, and I think that he has changed his ways and started to move on the right track.