Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye belongs to those who are eager for purchasing the original human nature. A rebellious adolescent Holden is a sixteen year-old junior who has just been expelled for academic failure from a school Pencey Prep, which is his fourth school. He has already failed out of three others. In his three-day-two-night story, Holden fistfights with his roommate Stradlater for his first lover Jane, smokes heavily, drinks as possible as he can, goes to nightclubs to flirt and dance with older women, even tries to have sexual relationship with a prostitute. His talk is filled with profanity such as “goddam’’ which appears for 245 times in the novel Meanwhile, he is “the most terrific liar”. He lies to almost everyone he connects with even to those whom he just comes across. He likes wearing his red hunting hat to show his uniqueness and inpiduality.
In the book, Salinger uses a lot of dialects and slangs to record everything that happens around Holden to show us the complex, ambivalent of contemporary youth. This paper, through analyzing Holden’s rebellious personality, warned young people who must choose wisely leading the way to the White love.

II. Holden Caulfield Rebellious Character Performance

The Catcher in the Rye describes an unusual rebellion Holden Caulfield, who is trying to pursue the wheat to have a simple, happy life. To realize his dream, the hero began to revolt many phenomena and things in American society, and show his rebellious character in the story.
2.1 Obscure Behavior and Dressing    
Holden lives in a phony world as we have discussed above, but as a 16-year-old adolescent, he has not enough power to rebel against it, he expresses his indirect rebellion with his obscure behavior and dressing. He likes “horsing around” and he pretends to be a “blind guy” with Ackley; he does not like to study and has been expelled from several schools; he leaves Pencey Pep ahead of time to take a three-day adventure in New York; he also goes to bars and drinks alcohol and he even asks for a prostitute in the hotel he stays when in New York. Besides these obscure behaviors, his dressing is also obscure especially his red hunting hat, which we will mainly discuss in this part.
With the publishing of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, an intensely popular interest in Holden Caulfield immediately grows among the young people. They wear overcoat, red hunting hat with the peak around to the back as the way Holden does. The kind of hat and the way Holden wears was so popular among the young. There are various interpretations of Holden’s red hunting hat; here we consider it a sign of rebellion for Holden.
The red hunting hat has been mentioned twenty-four times in the novel. Holden buys it in New York for a dollar after he loses Pencey’s fencing equipment. And before that, he has learned the news he would be expelled from Pencey. Some critics have suggested that the hat symbolizes Holden’s alienation from the world in which he lives. Holden buys it after all, when he loses the fencing equipment, which set him apart from the other team members, his hat has a very long peak. The way Holden wears is also unusual as he says: “I swung the old peak way around to the back very corny” (21; ch. 3). Obviously, Holden knows the way he wears the hat with the peak reversed is obscure and irregular, but he likes it, he doesn’t think of it as “People shooting hat” in the literal sense, but “he means to take up weapons and have it out of phonies” (Sarfford 40). In other words, it also means that Holden likes to be different from others and to be against the convention. The way Holden wears the hat can be seen as a sign against the social customs and convention.
Furthermore, in dictionary, “red” can be explained as “person supporting revolution or radical polices”. Among planets of solar system, “red” also represents Mars, which associates “war” in ancient Roman mythology. In a sense, “war” also means rebellion. At this point, the red hunting hat also means aggressive tendencies so Aekley calls it a “deer shooting hat” (26; ch.3). And Holden facetiously retorts: “I shoot people in this hat” (26; ch. 3). The hat, indeed, is the central symbol of Holden’s fantasy for aggression (Salzberg 73). 麦田里的守望者霍尔顿的叛逆心理(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_9997.html