The Catcher in the Rye is a phony.

When I first heard the next book we would be reading in English class was some stupid book about a baseball catcher and some bread, I was sure I would zone out while reading it and pray to be carried by sparknotes and a movie adaption. As you can expect, I was heartbroken when I searched on iTunes for the movie, and all I found was an old Guns and Roses song and some rotten movie about the life of J.D. Salinger called “Rebel in the Rye”. What I did not expect while reading the book, was how accurately Pencey Prep and Holden were exact parallels of Westlake High School and even some of my friends. The Catcher in the Rye could have been written in 2018. After reading the book, I began to wonder about the societal impact of inauthenticity has on the world.

The post war 1940s in New York City, were not that different than modern society today. The main character Holden is like a starving lone wolf. He yearns to join a pack but only if he is the alpha, which causes him to go hungry. Holden craves human interactions, but attempts to do so by elevating himself as pure and wholesome. Holden believes that the world around him is corrupt because the people around him are are “phonies” (Sahlinger 5). While at Pencey Prep, Holden is annoyed because powerful people can say something “nobody understands,” and everyone else, like the kids at Pencey and the elevator boy in the apartment, will do “practically anything [they] want them to,” to elevate their own social ranking. Phonies hide their true identity to keep their lives safe from judgement and being stripped down naked for who they truly are (174). Inauthentic people always “clap at the wrong things” because when somebody becomes a phony some of their personality is sacrificed to society to please the people around them, like feeding meat to a dog (94). But the dog keeps eating and eating and eating, its ravenous hunger is a bottomless pit until there is nothing left to eat but bone, a shell of their former self.  Holden becomes so surrounded by phonies that he himself is deceived into being more mature than others. He becomes the biggest phony of all because he is obsessed with how the world views him. He has to put on a fake personality to attempt to please the people around him. Phonies are people who would rather sculpt their personalities to what society wants them to look like rather than what they truly are.

What I’ve realized is many of my friends were also victims of being inauthentic. Inauthenticity has exponentially gown from the 1940s thanks to the dawn of social media. At Westlake the amount of likes you get determines your social life. I’ve grown apart from friends because they would post intimate and inaccurate things on social media just to elevate themselves and bring down the people around them. Social media changed them so much that one day, I stopped recognizing some of my closest friends. People at Westlake live in a bubble of repetition and dullness because we are trapped in inauthenticity caused by ourselves. I am a phony. Holden is a phony. We are all phonies. Everyday we all put on a mask to hide our true identities and protect us from the truth. When we creates these false identities, we turn our lives into a sluggish crawl of repetition of how many likes can I get and how many girls snapchatted me. It becomes an exhausting grind to be something we aren’t.

After reading the Catcher in the Rye one thing became clear: Inauthenticity creates the illusion a social stability and safety, but in reality being inauthentic takes away from our own unique human experiences and causes us lose a piece of our identity to be molded to fit a societal expectation. So of course the Catcher in the Rye is a phony because our whole society is a phony. We are children who have yet to be saved by a Catcher in the Rye.  

Works Cited

Salinger, J.D. “The Catcher in the Rye.” New York: Little, Brown and Company. 0-234. 15 October _______2018. Print