JD asks: `Who exactly is Buddy Glass ?' The only possible answer is also the most trite. Buddy is J.D.Salinger. As is Seymour, Sergeant X., Bessie, Phoebe, Sybil.... But when Jerome was being these various characters - suffering their emotions, walking their walk, feeling the way the words rose to their mouth & so on - on quite a number of occasions & during these moments of creative imagination he was almost certainly possessed at the same time with how it might have been with certain actual other persons who inhabited or had inhabited his particular corner of the universe. So that the hunt for the various possible Sybils is quite a valid one. In a very high proportion of cases, I believe, the fictional character is prompted by memory of the actual. Writers vary in their frankness about all this. Some of the great ones - Hemingway, Proust, Trollope come to mind - made no attempt to disguise the fact they had often deliberately aimed at an actual reproduction. The distortion, the caricaturing, the blending of traits, is the `creative', individual contribution of the artist. But I find it very hard to think there is not always some germ cell from the `real' world. It's when there's no such germ that you get the cardboard cutout, the universally applicable, the intractably lifeless character. Scottie B.