About the theme 'phoniness'.

A big theme in The Catcher in the Rye is Holden’s feelings about what he calls phoniness. The majority of the people Holden describes are phoney. His meaning of phoniness mostly relates to the adult world. He means that when you’re an adult you’re fake and mendacious, you’ve lost the freedom of childhood and youth and you’re just living after the “rules”. Get employed, find a life partner, get married, have kids, a big house and a nice car, get old and then be dead with a lot of flowers on your grave. When you read the book, you can get the feeling of Holden having a problem realizing he’ll soon be an adult too, that he doesn’t want to accept it.

Besides the adults, some of the teenagers that are mentioned in the book are described as phonies too. One example is Ward Stradlater, Holden’s room mate at Pencey preparatory school. Stradlater is this good looking and popular guy whose thoughts always are directed to the girls. He seems to be adapting to the girl he is dating at the time, trying to impress them with style and materialism. While Holden wants to know about the girl’s interests and personalities, Stradlater only cares about what he gets out of it. He never really seems to have any deep feelings for the girls. This is shown with this quotation.

“’Who’s your date?’ I asked him. ‘Fitzgerald?’
‘Hell, no! I told ya, I’m through with that pig.’
‘Yeah? Give her to me, boy. No kidding. She’s my type.’
‘Take her. … She’s too old for you.’” (page 34).

Another example of what Holden describes as phoney is that the school, Pencey prep, serves steaks only on Saturdays. This just because a lot of the student’s parents visit them at Sundays and wonder what they had for dinner last night. Then the students will tell them that they got steak and this is supposed to give their parents a good feeling about the school.

”We always had the same meal on Saturday nights at Pencey. It was supposed to be a big deal, because they gave you steak. I’ll bet a thousand bucks the reason they did that was because a lot of guys’ parents came up to school on Sunday, and old Thurmer probably figured everybody’s mother would ask their darling boy what he had for dinner last night, and he’d say, ‘Steak’.” (page 39).

The part in the book when Holden and his friend Sally are at the theatre, and Sally talks with a guy she knows, are yet another instance of Holden’s thoughts about phoniness.

“Then he and old Sally started talking about a lot of people they both knew. It was the phoniest conversation you ever heard in your life. They both kept thinking of places as fast as they could, then they’d think of somebody that lived there and mentioned their name. I was all set to puke when it was time to go sit down again. I really was. And then, when the next act was over, they continued their goddam boring conversation. They kept thinking of more places and more names of people that lived there. The worst part was, the jerk had one of those very phoney, Ivy League voices, one of those very tired, snobby voices. He sounded just like a girl.” (page 133-134).

Holden seems to be judging people as phonies quite easily. Whenever he feels that somebody are a bit superficial and simple-minded, he judges them as phonies.

Maybe Holden’s got the wrong opinion about people. He doesn’t really seems to accept the fact that everybody isn’t thinking the way he does. It doesn’t look like he gives people many chances to show off their personalities, he’s almost stuck at his first impression of them.

For whom is this worst, Holden or the people around him?

By: Leona and Kajsa