Thanks society, we are all PHONIES!!

According to the Cambridge Dictionary “phony” means to be a person who falsely pretends to be something. Sadly, Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, could be named a phony, who do not fear to lie every time he wants to do it. However, he despises all people that have a phony, fraudulent, fake attitude, which is of course really cynical.

                Nonetheless, if he lies, it is because he desires to leave a place or to avoid someone. And it is in those actions that he regularly demonstrates his despair for loneliness and self-isolation. For instance, in the begging of the book, when he tells his teacher, Mr. Spencer, that he had to pick up his equipment at the gym to leave the place as faster as he can.

                Throughout the whole narration, the protagonist shows bitterness and a sense of not belonging to this society or world. What is more, Holden is most of the time complaining about the stupidity of the world, the little sense of humanity that people have, so he is regularly self-protecting himself by isolating himself from the world. In fact, in many cases, Holden repudiates people’s personalities. For example, he criticizes a lot his roommate Stradlater, which from the point of view of the protagonist is a “sexy bastard”, which according to Caulfield is like saying that his roommate is full of superficialities, pretensions, and emptiness.

                So far, you may be thinking that this Caulfield is just another guy that has a superiority complex, or autism, and that is trying to show his originality by despising other people. Well, at least while I was reading, that was my perspective of his personality. After reading more, I realized that what he was living when he was sixteen-year-old, it is just what most of us is living nowadays at University. I am referring to this inner fight about what is our passion, about what is adulthood.

                Today, people tend to believe that if you are original and a kind of hater, you are cool and superior. Maybe they are just trying to survive to the transition between childhood and adulthood. Or more than surviving, they are avoiding maturity with their attitude.

                For Caulfield, the adulthood is full of “phoniness”, as he compares it in the book, implicitly, with falling down of a cliff, which of course is a traumatic event. Maybe that is why he is always covering himself with isolation, as for not growing up, because it could be that society is which makes you grow up and transforms you into a person full of “phoniness”. Maybe he is just terrified by the idea of change and disappearance due to the death of his younger brother Allie.

                If society is which would probably convert you into a phony person, according to Holden, it comes to my mind Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who among different professions was a philosopher as well. That outstanding man claimed that “man born good, but society corrupts him”. At the end of the video is attached a video about this perspective, but only the beginning is accurate with this topic. The philosopher mentioned stated that men born free and pure, just as Holden wanted to be forever.

                If the philosopher was right, Caulfield is doing well by preventing himself of entering to adulthood and also to society. This society that is a system that only works for the minority. This society that is unfair. Maybe more than the society, it is the economic model that the elite has built for us which is making people sick and full of “phoniness”. Anyway, there is lack of humanity, there is superficiality, there is stupidity, but we could remedy this by what Holden shows us at the end of the book when he is staring at his younger sister while she is playing in the carousel and reaching out of the ring. He shows himself as a person that is willing to maintain the innocence, even though he knows that out there “phoniness” is still trying to win, searching for moments where humanity is aroused and also attempting to not let all the bad of society to win.

                Finally, at the very end, Holden looks happy or at least he looks convinced about his younger sister’s innocence and intelligence, which let him being in peace.

                Do you think that society has corrupted you so far? Do you still feel that your attitude towards the world is the best? Or are you just going to sit in there to judge everybody, doing anything, and still being a PHONY????