Salinger uses Allie’s baseball mitt as a symbol of his protagonist’s inner conflict. When Holden’s roommate at Pencey, Stradlater, asks him to write a descriptive essay, Holden writes about his beloved brother Allie’s baseball mitt. Holden treats the mitt reverently, taking it with him to Pencey and copying “down the poems that were written on it” (Salinger 38). For Holden, the baseball mitt is “an object which is a complex version of a child's security blanket, a sacred relic of the living dead” (Miller). In addition, the baseball mitt symbolizes Holden's unresolved emotions surrounding his brother's untimely death. Not coincidentally, Salinger chooses this moment to introduce Holden’s rage and guilt. Holden says that when Allie died, he “was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage.” (Salinger 37) Holden’s violent actions reveal the intensity of his emotional state. Remembering his brother through the mitt and brooding on the fact that his roommate Stadlater is on a date with Jane Gallagher, a girl whose absence haunts Holden throughout the novel, Holden works himself into a state of considerable emotional turmoil by the end of the chapter.