The main character portrayed in the story is Kenneth, a curious, kind boy with hair as red as a new penny and a devotion to literature so earnest he copies out lines of Browning on the back of his baseball mitt. He loves the sport but has to stop going to live games when he sees a great player strike out. After reading Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw he won’t speak to anyone for a week. He heatedly defends his absent brother Holden when a man in a restaurant affectionately refers to him as “the little crazy one”. He suffers from “the severest kind of heart trouble”. Of all the sensitive souls in Salinger’s cast, Kenneth Caulfield is one of the most touching. To some readers, he may seem a little sappy and dated, the originator of one too many “aw, gees” and “swells”. But then, he is supposed to be too good for this world – the jolly character offset by the brutal message – and he’s perceptive, too. He worries about Holden, who “can’t make any compromises”. He advises Vincent to marry his girlfriend because she’s not too smart and therefore “you wouldn’t hurt her feelings when you’re sarcastic”. At the end, he dies, abruptly, and with a somewhat unsophisticated emotional tug.