To some, this argument may seem the most blatant form of lying, horrendous, even, in its tastelessness, a sort of literary sacrilege, in fact. Surely we have reached the end, one might say, when one can consider the comparison between the immortal Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and the teenage protagonist of Salinger's The Huntsman. Salinger's hero has been compared to many literary figures, from Huckleberry Finn to David Copperfield. Many different attitudes have been taken towards him. Let's stop talking about him and write something else. Isn't this topic getting boring? Maybe so, but Holden isn't going away. It continues to nag at the mind, and reading AC Bradley's analysis of the character of Hamlet, it was hard to resist the idea that much of what Bradley was saying about Hamlet also applied to Holden. Perhaps the comparison is not as absurd as it seems at first glance. Of course there is no similarity between the events of the play and those of the novel. What was fascinating while reading Bradley was how perfectly his analysis of Hamlet's character applied to Holden's, how deeply, in fact, he was getting into Holden's character as well, revealing, among other things, the its potentially tragic nature. After demolishing the theories of other critics, Bradley concluded that the essence of Hamlet's character is contained in his threefold analysis. First, that rather than being temperamentally melancholic, in the common sense of "deeply sad", he is a person of unusual nervous instability, subject to extreme and profound alterations of mood, a potential manic-depressive type. Romantic, we could say. Secondly, this Hamlet is also a person of "exquisite moral sensitivity", hypersensitive to goodness, a man...... middle of paper......considered a symbol of the plight of the idealist in the modern world. . Most importantly, however, it suggests why Holden Caulfied isn't going away, continues to exert such a powerful influence on the aging younger generation he first spoke to, and why he continues to re-brand himself among young people . Indeed, in this age of atrophy, in this thought-torn time in which we live, it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that, for many of us at least, our Hamlet is Holden. Works Cited Bradley , AC “Hamlet.” Shakespearean tragedy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981. 89-174. Sanders, Wlibur and Howard Jacobson. “Hamlet's Sanity.” Shakespeare's magnanimity: four tragic heroes, their friends and families. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 22-56.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992.