All the World’s a Stage
As they grow older, most adults realize that they have to be at any rate a little phony to get by in society. Whether it is to seem a bit more qualified or to set a better first impression, the adult world would seemingly cease to function without the occasional small push of insincerity and white lies. It is something that may most children may be oblivious to but adults are well aware of its presence and essentiality. J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, follows the narrative told from the point of view of a boy named Holden Caulfield who is plagued with his obsession with “phonies” in the world. In Holden’s definition, a phony is a hypocrite: someone who is insincere and not true to what is the evident truth and the world is full of them. As he writes his story, Holden is somewhere a year ahead of the events that happened the year a little bit before
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Therefore, he believes that children are the only people who aren’t “fake”. In the end, Holden’s infatuation with phoniness boils down to him feeling like he doesn’t fit into a society in which he doesn’t want to conform to fit into. Baer and Gelser agree by stating that, “Reconsidering the concept of therapeutic landscapes in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” Holden’s main obstacle was staying “a child without defiling childhood by his current reality.” (Baer and Gesler, 410) Similarly, Daniel Mendelsohn states, “one of the novel’s many markers of Holden’s problem, which is a refusal to grow up. The allergy to change, the inability to countenance compromise and the self-congratulatory contempt for anyone who has done so...” (Mendelsohn, 1) Holden reasons people are phonies because he cannot accept the fact that people's behaviors, personalities, and actions will always change when surrounded by other people because it is a force of nature that everyone learns to do so that they can survive in the