Phoniness

Throughout Catcher in the Rye, Holden says that many different things are phony. One of the things that he calls phony is the Headmaster of Pencey Prep. He called the Headmaster phony because when parents came to the school, he would be very polite and social to the important parents, but give the parents who weren't important the cold shoulder. The phonies in our society today are all of us. If you go into a job interview and act like yourself, you won't get the job. But if you go in, be polite, shake hands, and dress up, you have a lot better chance of getting the job. The way that society is built up today makes it so that all of us have to act phony to get anywhere in life. Holden himself isn't that much of a phony, because he never acts like more of a phony than any of us. He just acts like he feels, not like what society says he should feel. An example of this is when he drinks alcohol even though he is underage.