Catcher In The Rye Quote Analysis

“Inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist.” This quote by George Carlin perfectly outlines the reasons why many people are bitter toward the world in their everyday lives. While cynicism is justified for those who have had a tough life, countless people become exceedingly pessimistic because life didn’t meet their expectations.. An example of this would be Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”. Salinger does an admirable job of portraying how Holden’s attitude leads to a massive downward spiral. When a person holds too high of standards for the world around them, it can lead to an unrelenting undue criticism of people around them and even hypocrisy.

Holden struggles to make connections with other people, and usually resorts to calling them phonies whenever they upset him. He finds natural human flaws in people and runs away from connection immediately. His date with Sally shows this. Near the end of the date, Holden tells Sally about his plans to run away from life. When Sally gives him practical advice, Holden is quick to escape connection by calling her “a pain”. Sally’s advice would definitely guide Holden in a more realistic direction, but that is not what he wants to hear. Conflict always arises in his mind even if there is little in reality. His struggles with finding connection also make him too apprehensive to call his old friend Jane. Holden likes to think of Jane as a pure and perfect girl that he can

always think of as pure an innocent. He rarely takes steps to contact her as it could ruin the view of her as a symbol of impeccable ideals, especially now that he is identifying nearly everyone as phonies. If Holden isolates himself from connection, he will never be able to truly achieve happiness.

Holden uses the word “phony” wantonly during the book whenever he feels someone is acting better than him, but Holden is very much a phony himself. Firstly, he considers the Lunts to be “show-offs and sellouts”. However, when he takes Sally on a date, he orders tickets to them anyway, because he wants to impress her. This is pure phoniness because of how he alters his opinions on whether to watch a show entirely based on physical beauty. If this were another person telling Holden about how they bought tickets to the Lunts to impress a girl, Holden would have run off in a flash, calling the phony all the way. He also admits to lying regularly. During the ride away from Pencey, he meets Ernest Morrow’s mother. Instead of telling her the truth, he makes up a phony story about him needing an operation. Afterwards, he says he could go on lying for hours without stopping. Holden really has no reason to lie here other than to grab attention, as his story his tailor-made to evoke sympathy. If he had simply said he didn’t want to talk about it, he wouldn’t have had to tell about him getting kicked out of Pencey. When Holden is around women, he acts completely differently than he does normally, further showing how his attraction to women alters his choices and personality. As shown in his conversation with Phoebe, almost nothing makes Holden actually happy, but he seems to enjoy himself when women are involved. Holden would likely find his own actions with the Seattle women at the bar to be unquestionable phoniness.

The last way Holden is a phony is that he is incredibly self-absorbed due to his pessimism. Holden is too caught-up in his own resentment to realize other people’s lives carry just as much weight as his. Near the end of the book, he is excited to get home so he can talk to his sister Phoebe again. When Phoebe predicts that Holden got kicked out of school, he goes on a rambling tirade about how much he hated the school and why he is so much better without it, though this conversation is more about Phoebe’s struggle with growing up than another one of Holden’s expulsions. Phoebe tries to come to terms with Holden’s failures and it rubs off on her, but Holden is too focused on his own reasons to hate the world, that he cannot see that Phoebe has her own problems as well, and that Phoebe also needs someone to talk to. Later, She comes to Holden with her luggage, wanting to come with him, which takes Holden by shock. He did not realize that his sister could also have issues coping with life, but he made his pessimism all about him and his struggle. Holden’s brother is another example. Throughout the book, Holden fleetingly refers to his older brother, usually complaining about his career choice in movie writing, rather than book writing. Holden seems to think that his personal qualms with the movie industry should control his brother’s life. With his pessimism comes the thought that his opinion matters more than his brother’s when deciding how to make money.

Holden never gets a happy ending at the end of the book, because he never changes his views.

He comes to some realizations, but nothing that makes him less pessimistic, making him a shining example of how being immoderately idealistic can disrupt your expectations for the world. It is glaringly clear that Salinger purposely portrayed Holden as a mess in order to show off the flaws of setting expectations above the healthy dose. If you only accept people without flaws and never leave room for air, you will always be

disappointed.