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Oliver Schick
@bothwell
Lol. In defence of the Catcher in the Rye, it's absolutely true that Holden is a terrible person but lots of good books are about terrible people.
I don't think there's a single likeable person in The Great Gatsby, for instance. Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's is intolerable. Imagine if Sherlock Holmes worked in your office and you had to deal with him every single day. Imagine if you had to share a flat with anyone from anything by Camus! Awful.
But horrible people have stories too, and Holden Caulfield is a horrible person around whom Salinger wrote a good story. I don't think that likeability in a protagonist is necessarily the most important thing in a book, you know? You can have a flawed, fairly unsympathetic protagonist and that's not always a bad thing.