How is Allie's baseball glove important to The Catcher in the Rye?

The baseball glove ofis
mentioned at the end of Chapter Five, and is the topic thatchooses to write the descriptive
composition on for Stradlater. Note the description that Holden gives us of the baseball glove
of his dead brother:

My brother Allie had this left-handed
fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he
had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote
them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at
bat.

However, far more important is the way that the
baseball glove acts as a powerful memory of Holden's dead brother and the love that he has for
him and the way that it demonstrates Holden's attachment, but also his problems at trying to
accept his brother's death. Note the way in which he tells us--almost as an afterthought--that
the night his brother died, he broke all the windows of the garage with his fist, "just for
the hell of it":

It was a very stupid thing to do,
I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie.

The fact that he was going to be psychoanalysed for this behaviour
shows how violent and destructive it was, and also points out that Holden still has some deep
unresolved issues regarding his brother's death and his acceptance of it. The value of the glove
therefore lies in what it tells us about Holden and his psychological state: he is clearly a
very angry young man, and we can see this in the act of self-harm he committed after his
brother's death just as we can see it in the way he rails against all the "phonies" he
comes across.