Chapman put on and discarded the personalities of friends with whom he sought to identify. In some cases, he says he virtually became the people that he admired. Until he became Holden Caulfield, the killer denies that he ever had a personality apart from “the alter ego of whoever I was closest to at a given point in my life, usually a friend a few years older than myself. I was always somebody’s sidekick. Anybody I was with, I became them. I had no personality of my own. Why didn’t I have any substance to myself? What happened? Why was my personality always so fragmented?”
