Examples Of Phonies In Catcher In The Rye

The novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is mainly about the awful phony world. Holden typically calls adults phonies, but a phony is also a person who is fake, shows off, and lies. Since adults are phonies, Holden does not want to grow up. He fears that his innocence and children’s innocence can be taken away by phonies. As a result, Holden metaphorically and literally is the catcher in the rye who protects children’s innocence in order to guide them into not becoming adults. Holden as the catcher in the rye, allows himself to stay genuine. However, Holden later realizes that good things can survive in a world of phonies because eventually everyone grows up, but that does not necessarily mean they turn into phonies. For example, Holden

By becoming the catcher in the rye, it allows him to have an excuse for not actually fighting phonies because he needs to protect kids. Holden believes that he is fighting the phony world by protecting kids from falling off this cliff which he mentions when Phoebe is telling him about being wrong. He pictures “little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around-nobody big” except for Holden who is “standing on the edge of some crazy cliff” and if the kids are not looking where they are going; Holden has to “come out from somewhere and catch them” (224, 225). Being the catcher in the rye metaphorically means that there is a very steep cliff, and at the top of the cliff, there are children playing around while Holden is at the edge of the cliff protecting them from not falling down. The top of the cliff represents innocence and genuineness. While the bottom of the cliff represents phoniness and adulthood. By Holden “catching” the kids from falling down the cliff, he means that “certain things” “should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone” (158). Holden just wants things to not change. The phony world causes Holden to be very scared and to lose his mind because, throughout the book, he keeps seeing kid’s

In the three scenes where the f-word appears, each one consecutively shows Holden’s understanding of the phony world. When he is walking down the stairs of a school he sees that somebody wrote “fuck you on the wall” which drives him crazy and thinks about “how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it” and he “figured that it was some perverty bum that'd” sneak into “the school late at night to take a leak or something,” and then would write on the wall (260, 261). Here he blames the phonies for exposing kids to the adult world in order to get rid of their innocence. The second f-word appears in another staircase, but this one is carved in. As Holden mentions he tries “to rub it off with” his "hand” but “it wouldn’t come off. It’s hopeless, anyway. If you” have “a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the fuck you signs in the world” (262). This represents that he is losing the game of being the catcher in the rye and he should just accept the fact that he cannot change the world. The third f-word appears in the museum, which is “written with a red crayon right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones” (264). The red crayon implies that the f-word is written by a kid, which metaphorically means that kids know about the phony world since the dawn of time. Here is where Holden realizes that the good things in the phony world can