Holden is a teenage boy who is going through the growing pains of the transition from child to adult. Holden has started seeing the reality of the real world, and how “fake” everyone in it is. Everywhere he looks, all he can see are phonies and fakes. The fakery of the real world bothers Holden very much, and most of the story is him trying to escape from the fakeness. He claims to be “depressed” by seemingly innocent things. This is shown in Chapter 22, when Phoebe presses him to tell her something he likes, which he can’t really answer. When Phoebe says he doesn’t like anything he says “It made me even more depressed when she said that (Pg. 169)”. During the story, he appears to be an impulsive liar. He uses fake names and tells tall-tales based on what people want to hear. On the train, he runs into the mother of a classmate. When she asks about her son, he fabricates a story painting his classmate in a better light. “May i ask your name, dear?...”Rudolph Schmidt,” I told her. I didn’t feel like giving her my whole life story (Pg. 54)”. …show more content…
He is gripping onto the innocence of youth as hard as he can. One of his favorite places is the Museum. He remembers going to the museum every week as a child with his class. The thing that he remembers most about the museum is that nothing ever moved or changed, which he found calming. “ The best thing, though,i that museum was that everything always stayed right where is was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still just be finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole…(Pg.