Identity is the distinguishing characteristics or personality traits of an individual that makes them unique. One’s identity is developed through their own experiences in life, and one factor that plays a major role in the development of one’s identity is loneliness The dictionary definitions of loneliness are: (1) sadness because one has no friends or company, and (2) the quality of being unfrequented and remote; isolation. Loneliness is something everybody goes through in their lifetime and it can be either an internal or external factor depending on the circumstances. It is an internal factor if someone feels alone and depressed due to the lack of people in their life (see definition 1). It is an external factor if someone is truly alone and isolated from other people/society (see definition 2). Loneliness not only can influence each and everyone’s decisions, but it can change your identity and define who you are as a person. Examples of loneliness affecting identity is illustrated many times across many different books and characters such as in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye through Holden Caulfield, Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild through Chris McCandless, and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men through George Milton and Lennie Small.
The first example of loneliness affecting the identity of someone is shown in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye with Holden Caulfield. Holden didn’t have a very strong relationship with his family, mostly his parents, which along with the death of his younger brother Allie lead to him making rash decisions early in his life. “I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer” (Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye 39). These decisions landed him in multiple boarding schools, which evidently led to him growing farther away from his family...