Salinger's various stories (and one novel) featuring a character named Holden Caulfield do not share a cohesive timeline, and details about "Holden Caulfield" and his family are often inconsistent or completely contradictory from one story to another. Most notably, in some Salinger short stories "Holden Caulfield" is a soldier in WWII who was missing in action in 1944 -- something that is thoroughly impossible to have happened to the 16-year-old Holden Caulfield of "The Catcher In The Rye", which is set in 1948 or '49.