It drove him mad when I called him “Ackley kid”” (25). Throughout the text, age is portrayed in new ways. Sometimes it’s just in the mention of more youthful titles and sometimes it’s in mentioning other’s ages in relationship to Holden’s. “He was always telling me I was a goddam kid, because I was sixteen and he was eighteen. However, Holden turns right around and continues to call one of his friends a kid so that he can somehow feel more superior or more adult than someone who is only slightly older than himself. He wants to be viewed as a “man,” someone that older people could view as an equal. When meeting with a teacher he says, “I wished to hell he’d stop calling me “boy” all the time” (15). Holden begins to show resistance to the label of child or boy. When reading in the memetic register it is easy to look over comments on his youth, and brush them aside as meaningless thoughts. It is the reader’s job to look through the text and decide that age may be an important theme within the book. The narrator never comes right out and says Holden is slightly obsessed with his age and will eventually learn accept himself. In Kenneth Burke’s “Lexicon Rhetoric”, he describes the repetitive form as, “the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises” and “a restatement of the same thing in different ways” (125). The discussion of age in the novel is both a characteristic of the coming of age genre and an example of repetitive form. He wants everyone to view him as the “mature” person he believes he is. As the story progresses, people’s perception of his age really start to get to him. In the beginning of the book Holden is very conscious of how he acts and seems to take pride in that fact. It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true” (12). Everybody says that especially my father. “And yet I still act sometimes like I was only twelve.
Part of him wants to be an adult and have the responsibilities, but part of him is still immature and childish, which he acknowledges. Without reading the entire book, it is evident that the main character Holden is undergoing a journey to “find himself.” Holden seems to be particularly preoccupied by other people’s opinions of his age. Salinger can be described as a coming of age novel.