"Holden Caulfield: an advocate of honesty"

The Catcher in the Rye, one of Salinger’s masterpieces, tells us the painful and sad story of Holden Caulfield, a sixteen years old boy that was expelled from school because of his poor academic performance, and who is also trying to survive on this adult world of decadency that is being dominated by cruelty and artificiality. What a pity! Poor Holden… I am sure you thought the same at first, didn’t you? But let’s take a look. 

Holden Caulfield may be seen as a worldwide symbol of adolescence that tries to represent how difficult is for teenagers to overcome difficulties of the adult world, where nobody seems to care about them. Has this ever happened to you? That’s for sure. Throughout the novel, Holden seems to be excluded from the world around him, which may be labelled as a typical teenage feeling.

The Catcher in the Rye tries to expose a common situation among adolescents. However, what really makes this novel unique is the way in which the  is told. Salinger, by using the stream of consciousness style to narrate, looks that readers engage themselves into Holden’s mind, into his own way of seeing life. In this way, we are also able to notice how the protagonist of the story is frequently changing his thoughts. But that’s just normal, right? After all, adolescence is like a synonym of confusion. Yet, not all people think the same way and Holden’s actions make us feel like he is not just confused but most of the times he is contradictory. 

Holden’s main concern in life is to protect children and their innocence, since adulthood is full of hypocrisy. During the entire novel, Holden struggles against growing up and refuses to become part of a world that is so controlled by falseness.  There is no problem with that, right? He is just a boy who is trying to create a world of honesty and happiness in which children can remain innocent and perfect. What a hero! But wait, maybe we should start analyzing him, since it seems that Holden does not always appear to be an advocate of truth.

The first thing that lead us to believe that Holden does not fit the image of an idol is the way in which he refers to people. As Holden feels surrounded by dishonesty and false pretenses, he is always criticizing those who are not what they appear to be, and his indignation is mostly reflected on his language, which is violent and full of anger. One of Holden’s favorite words is “phony”, a phrase he uses for describing the superficiality, pretension, and shallowness. Holden makes it look kind of cool and unique to call everyone a phony. Though he is not entirely wrong about his accusations of society, his desperate attempt of recognizing hypocrisy around him steers him away from observing his own phoniness.

As we go deep into the novel we can realize that Holden is not what he appears to. His behavior does not reflect his beliefs or moral standards. Holden refers to people as phonies, but he is also a hypocrite because he is disgusted when people are different from what he believes. What’s more, everything that Holden seems to hate is present in his own way of acting. Even though he hates liars, he lies about himself to strangers and participates in the activities he detests. He does everything he repudiates, he is a just cynic:

"Oh, how nice!" the lady said. But not corny. She was just nice and all."I must tell Ernest we met" she said. "May I ask your name, dear?" "Rudolf Schmidt" I told her. "I didn't feel like giving her my whole life history". Rudolf Schmidt was the name of the janitor of our dorm."

Here, for example, we can see that there was literally no reason for him to lie, he just didn’t feel like telling the truth. So, why isn’t this phony? That’s the problem, some people are so concerned about what can be said about them that they are incapable of facing the truth. Just as Holden didn’t admit that his worst enemy wasn’t phoniness but loneliness, and that the only thing he was looking for was sympathy.

To sum up, I would like to say that none of us are indifferent to this situation. Everybody twists the true every now and then, don’t we? But here comes my advice: Don’t try to unmask reality if you are not ready to expose your own truth; embrace contradiction.

"We are all hypocrites. We cannot see ourselves or judge ourselves the way we see and judge others". José Emilio Pacheco