Throughout the novel, Holden is protective of children and innocence. Surely, this is related to his feelings for Allie, whom he could not defend from death. He keeps Allie’s baseball glove with him and often thinks about his brother. We might suspect that such an intimate topic will be wasted on Stradlater.
Chronologically, Holden was 13 when 11-year-old Allie died on July 18, 1946. He is seventeen when he tells his story. Depending on the date of Holden’s birthday — and his reliability with numbers — we might make an educated guess as to the time of the action in the novel: apparently, Holden is in California, narrating the novel, sometime around the middle of 1950, probably reporting the events of late 1949.
