Holden Caulfield - Anti-Hero or just Anti-Social
...otball team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques." (Salinger 131). As you can see by this quote from Holden, he feels as if the whole school system, or at least the ones he has been in, is based on phoniness. Holden doesn't only feel this way about Pencey, he mentions Mr. Haas, the headmaster from Elkton Hills, his former school. He talks about how Mr. Haas would give a fake smile and shake the hands of parents when they came in. This is one of the reasons that Holden left Elkton Hills. At Pencey there are a few people that really set Holden off. One of these people was his roommate, Stradlater. Holden's description of Stradlater fits the description of a "closet-phony". Someone who acts phony to gain popularity, social status, or other things, but they are really not anything like the person they pretend to be. Holden tells us of how Stradlater is always clean-shaven and how he dresses nice, when really Stradlater is a slob, and uses a rusty old razor to attain his clean-shaven look. Holden doesn't like this, and thinks less of Stradlater because of it. Another person Holden doesn't think much of is Mr. Spencer. Its not that Holden doesn't like Mr. Spencer, its just that when he uses the word "grand" to describe things, it really pushes Holden's buttons. Holden seems to think that most people around him are acting phony. All the cliques at his school, all the conversations, the sports teams and even some of the teachers at Pencey are phony according to Holden. This sort of cynical attitude towards everything seems to be holding Holden back from becoming a more "socially enlightened" person. If Holden would get to know some people and see what they are like, it could lead to a changing of his attitude. In the novel it seems like Holden doesn't have many friends, and I think that it is probably because of his cyicism towards everything. "Do I trust some and get fooled by phoniness, or do I trust nobody and live in loneliness?" Are lyrics from a song called "By Myself" by Linkin Park. This line from the song, to me, describes Holden to a 'T'. Holden doesn't want to trust anyone, or become friends with anyone because he knows that two things could happen to him. The first thing that could happen to Holden, and the thing that I think that Holden would dislike the most, would be that he starts to be around these "phonies" to see what they are really like, and he ends up becoming one himself. Holden seems to be striving to be different, and distancing himself from everyone except a few select people seems to be his way of being different. If he has to make up excuses to say that people are phony, he's going to. It also seems that he's been telling himself these things for so long that he now believes them to be true. The second thing that could happen to Holden is tha...