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Phoniness was Holden’s Downfall

Holden Caulfield sees life and the entire world as a struggle between the artificial things and those that are authentic. His main pasttime is to detect phoniness in other people’s lives and to harshly critisize it, as well. And, although he loves the purity and innocence that childhood brings with it, and hates the artificiality of the adult world, he is, troughout the story of “The Catcher in the Rye“, gradually forced into it, due to his surroundings as well as himself. Sanford Pinsker described the book as beinga “mixture of bright talk and brittle manners, religious quest and nervous breakdown, [which] captured not only the perennial confusions of adolescence, but also the spiritual discomforts of an entire age.� His quest for phoniness is successful, yet the realisations it brings with it ultimately lead to his downfall.

To understand the novel’s setting and some of the character’s motifs, one must have an......

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Approximate Word Count: 3287
Approximate Pages: 14 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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