Teenager In Catcher In The Rye

There are many ways to define the typical teenager. During the transition from child to adult, a teenager will go through and experience many things. These could be things like finding out the truth about the world, the feeling of loneliness, and the urge to go out and experience sexual interaction. In J.D. Salinger’s book The Catcher in the Rye, the main character, Holden, experiences each of these during his time alone in New York. As a teenager grows up, they will see things in the world they did not see as a child. Throughout the book, Holden is always making observations about his surroundings and what he realizes about them. Something Holden likes to constantly point out is all the phoniness and fake people around him, like when he was on his date with Sally, saying, “You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody...talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were” (164). He also mentions how he was surrounded by so many phonies at two of his schools, Elkton Hills and Pencey, saying, “One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies” (19) and, “‘[Pencey] was full of phonies’” (217). Since Holden is constantly saying things like this, one would assume that he thinks people are fake, and he is not …show more content…
Holden has experienced each one, and it can clearly be seen in Catcher in the Rye. Many teenagers have experienced them as well. Their experiences change their perception of the world, their insecurity can often give them the feeling they can not reach out to others, and their hormones as they go through puberty can give them the desire to engage in sexual activity. However, those three are not the only aspects of being one. There are many, many more aspects to being a typical teenager, and Holden has probably experienced a lot more than only three of