Although Sunny is the more frightening of the two, neither belongs there. His interactions with the prostitute Sunny are comic as well as touching, partly because they are both adolescents trying to be adults. In his confusion, he sees this behavior as a weakness that may even call for psychotherapy. He stops making sexual advances when a girl says "No." He has trouble being very intimate unless he knows the girl well and likes her a lot. Despite his limited experience, his attitude toward women is actually admirable and mature. He seems best at the rites of passage (smoking and drinking) that are themselves artificial if not self-destructive. But he despises the compromises, loss of innocence, absence of integrity, and loss of authenticity in the grown-up world. He is attracted to the trappings of adulthood: booze, cigarettes, the idea of sex, and a kind of independence. Society and his own body are telling him that it is time for him to change. Holden resents the adult world and resists entry into it, but he has little choice. The schools are filled with lies and cruelty, ranging in degree from the relatively harmless Pencey school motto ("Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.") to the brutally forced suicide of James Castle at Elkton Hills. To Holden, Pencey and the other prep schools that he has attended represent all that is artificial ("phony" is one of Holden's favorite words to describe this artificiality) and all that is despicable about any institution controlled by adults. He is alternately depressed, confused, angry, anxious, perceptive, bigoted, resentful, thoughtful, kind, and horny. He is out of shape because he smokes too much. He has grown 6 1/2 inches in just one year. Holden is 16 years old as the central story begins, tall at 6 feet 2 1/2 inches, partially gray-haired, and woefully skinny. Holden wants to tell what happened over a two-day period the previous December, beginning on the Saturday afternoon of the traditional season-ending football game between his school, Pencey Prep, and Saxon Hall. The novel is a frame story (a story within a certain fictional framework) in the form of a long flashback. Holden Caulfield, the 17-year-old narrator and protagonist of the novel, speaks to the reader directly from a mental hospital or sanitarium in southern California.
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