THE KINSHIP OF A CHILD, AN ADOLESCENT, AND A MAN

In that sense Chapman was phony, acting and playing the role of an adult when in reality he was only fooling himself. This is reminiscent of how Holden had presented himself to strangers. He had acted like an adult taking full advantage of his height and patch of gray hair It seemed he had enjoyed the company of adults far more than that of people his own age

So in order to interact with an adult he had to play the role of one, even making up a name that sounded “adult-ish”, clearly shown in this excerpt from Catcher In The Rye: “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jim Steele...She didn't care what my name was, naturally Hey, how old are you, anyways? Me? Twenty-two” (Salinger 105)

Throughout the novel, Holden displays several habits that usually only adults would partake in A prime example being drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes; Holden does so to play the part of one, even going as far as lying about his name and age to convince a prostitute.

Despite his distaste for phonies, Holden had been one for seemingly acting like an adult when in reality he was but a minor In the end, both figures had created a falsehood in order to fit into the maturity of adults.

Preceding Hinckley and Chapman's thirst for attention, they developed an obsession, one just as intense if not more than Holden's infatuation for innocence

For Hinckley, it was the theme of a love that was ultimately met with a tragedy, a tragedy that he was prepared to create himself. That tragedy of course was his preparation for the assassination of Ronald Reagan, a process that was written in “An Assassins Portrait”: “He seems to have spent much of his time in Hollywood seeing and thinking about the movie Taxi Driver He saw it fifteen times… He had Romeo and Juliet. It's a tale of doomed young lovers, a distant reverberation of the pact he fancied making with Jodie Foster… Hinckley bought a rifle exactly like the one Oswald used to shoot President Kennedy his arsenal contained the same number of guns as Travis Bickle’s” (McMillan 17) With a movie, an actress, and meticulous reenactments of other killers, Hinckley's obsession was bound to lead to his later actions. Deep enough for an obsession of a movie to lead to another of an actress in that movie, Jodie Foster, to whom he dedicated his attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan to. At a glance, Chapman's obsession may appear to be John Lennon, the victim of his murder, it was actually an obsession of the self To elaborate, in the biography Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, it is reported that Chapman repeatedly refers to a child, “It was a little kid that did the act of killing John Lennon… It was a child that killed John Lennon. It was a child killing his hero I preserved my childhood but a child's heart I was a child with an adult body I threw temper tantrums like a child It was a child's anger, a child's jealousy, a child's rage” (Jones 6) This child that Chapman keeps referring to is himself, perhaps never truly growing up as he should have, now locked inside of his own head, leading to this unhealthy obsession of himself in the past. The buildup of which was so great that it led to Chapman’s later act of murder