Examples Of Phony In Catcher In The Rye

The never ending insecurities that build up into a ball, and roll down to crush people’s emotions, is a hard feeling to stop naturally. Many people may worry, get anxiety, or just grow a thin border of fake personality, to protect and hide their real selves, from human judgement. Holden, the sixteen year-old boy with internal struggles of the human nature, is the main character of The Catcher in the Rye; a novel written by J.D. Salinger. Holden often fights his vexation against people with fake, shallow, hypocritical, inauthentic, and superficial personalities; by criticizing them all in one word, “phony”. Someone phony often times shows their fake, thin personality, when trying to impress someone. Throughout The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger …show more content…
Holden strongly emphasized how much he despises adults, when he first mentioned how phony Mr. Haas was. Mr. Haas is the headmaster of Elkton Hills, and according to Holden was “the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life” (QUOTE HERE). Holden goes on and explains that, “He’d be charming as hell and all… Except if some boy had little old funny-looking parents… then old Hans would just shake hands with them and give them a phony smile and then he'd go talk, for maybe a half an hour, with somebody else's parents” (QUOTE HERE). The fact that Mr. Haas would pretend to be happy to see the funny-looking parents, is a very phony act that Holden has described as “One of the biggest reasons why I left Elkton Hills” (QUOTE HERE). In order to keep his job as a headmaster and continue getting a good pay, he needs to communicate with the people he doesn’t really want to with. If he disregards some parents and students, they might complain, or just unenroll their child from the school. It is all about money and impressing …show more content…
Holden talks about Veteran’s Day at Pencey Prep, a day where all the Pencey alumni that graduated from around 1776, were greeted by the younger generation at Pencey. He goes in talking about a Pencey alumni, that kept trying to find his carved initials in one of the can doors in the bathroom.“He kept talking to us the whole time, telling us how when he was at Pencey they were the happiest days of his life, … Boy, did he depress me! I don't mean he was a bad guy--he wasn't. But you don't have to be a bad guy to depress somebody--you can be a good guy and do it. All you have to do to depress somebody is give them a lot of phony advice while you're looking for your initials in some can door--that's all you have to do” (QUOTE HERE). The old Pencey alumni definitely wanted to impress Holden and the other young students, by telling them how cool he was back then, by engraving his initials. Holden couldn’t relate to the alumni’s happiness at Pencey, therefore he thought he was phony. Holden hated Pencey so much that he even left the school early after the ax, while the alumi kept “telling us how when he was at Pencey they were the happiest days of his life” (QUOTE HERE). “… He was all out of breath from just climbing up the stairs, and the whole time he was looking for his initials he kept breathing hard, with his nostrils all funny and sad, while he kept telling