Holden's Indecisiveness In Catcher In The Rye

One of the recurring themes throughout The Catcher in the Rye is Holden’s indecisiveness and his indecision takes over at key moments. For example, the first thing he did once he got off his train in New York City was enter a phone booth. He knows he wants to call someone but he continues to deny all of his options. D.B. is in Hollywood, Phoebe is sleeping, he ‘doesn't feel like’ calling Jane's mother, he's afraid Sally's mom will pick up the phone at her house and he doesn't like Carl Luce. Holden steps out of the phone booth after twenty minutes, having not called anyone. This is a prime example of how Holden doesn’t have the strong decisive personality needed to get things done. The whole novel comes off as him just wasting his time and his life because of his lack of a definitive objective. This idea of Holden having an indecisive, objectiveless and procrastinating mindset is enhanced by the way in which the novel was written. Throughout the novel there is no strong sense of continuity and there is no sense of events following each other in a natural sequence of cause and effect. It seems that Holden simply has one impulse after another and has no sense of direction.
Hamlet on the other hand seems to have a sense of direction but he doesn’t follow it. He was decisive enough to form an objective near the beginning of the play when he vows to

Holden’s indecisive character is in some ways a reflection of his creator, J.D. Salinger. Salinger too seemed to have had the indecisive characteristic that Holden bore with him throuought the novel. Before Salinger found creative writing, he went to a number of colleges, but didn’t graduate any of them. This shows that he too must have had some indecisive nature in his