Scout Finch's and Holden Caulfield's development into a person capable of assuming that outlook marks the culmination of the novel and indicates that, whatever evil they encounter, they will retain their conscience without becoming cynical or fed-up. Though they are still children at the end of the book, Scout and Holden's perspective on life develops from that of an innocent child into that of a near grown-up.
             Scout is a very unusual little girl, both in her own qualities and in her social position. She is unusually intelligent (she learns to read before beginning school), unusually confident (she fights boys without fear), unusually thoughtful (she worries about the essential goodness and evil of mankind), and unusually good (she always acts with the best intentions). At the beginning of the novel, Scout is an innocent, good-hearted five-year-old child who has no experience with the evils of the world. As the novel progresses, Scout has her first contact with evil in the form of racial prejudice, and the basic development of her character is governed by the question of whether she will emerge from that contact with her conscience and optimism intact or whether she will be bruised, hurt, or destroyed like Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. Thanks to Atticus's wisdom, Scout learns that though humanity has a great capacity for evil, it also has a great capacity for good, and that the evil can often be mitigated if one approaches others with an outlook of sympathy and understanding.
             Then there is Holden Caulfield who is the most noticeable of Holden's "peculiarities" is how extremely judgmental he is of almost everything and everybody. The obvious signs that Holden is a troubled and unreliable narrator are manifold: he fails out of four schools. He criticizes and philosophizes about people who are boring, people who are insecure, and, above all, people who are "phony." While Holden uses the label "phony" to imply that such ...