In the book "The Catcher In The Rye" by J.D. Salinger, the main character Holden is a universal teenager. He does things that I do, that my classmates do, and that teenagers all over the world would do. There is one example in the beginning of the book that sticks out to me a lot. Holden is visiting his old teacher, Spencer. Spencer talks to Holden about getting kicked out of Pencey and asks him if he ever even opened his history book. His answer was, "Well I sort of glanced through it a couple of times,"(Salinger 11). I hear this response all the time from kids in school. They don`t do their homework then when the teacher asks if they read it they say something along the lines of "well kind of" just to make it look better and not hurt the teachers feelings... just like Holden is doing with Spencer.
There is another example of Holden being a universal teenager towards the end of the book. He has no where else to sleep and ends up sleeping in a waiting room. A little while after he wakes up he ends up picking up a magazine that someone left on the bench next to him. He tells us, "But this damn article I started reading made me feel almost worse. It was all about hormones. It described how you should look, your face and eyes and all, if your hormones were in good shape, and I didn`t look that way at all,"(Salinger 195). Usually during the teenage years kids have trouble with their appearance, or they see things in magazines and think that they need to look like that or something is wrong with them or they`re not good enough if they don`t loook like that. For example when girls see the tall, skinny, blonde, models that wight 100 pounds and try to look like them to fit in and feel pretty. Holden is just being a universal teenager by thinking that there is something wrong with him because he doesn`t look like the man in the article. Its a typical universal teenager,
