Why Is Holden Caulfield Wrong

J. D Salinger’s Novel The Catcher in the Rye depicts a boy named Holden Caulfield whose view of reality seems turned around. When Holden tells us what happened to him or describes someone, his description seems warped and turns out to be negative. In his mind, he never does anything wrong, and he depicts the people he likes as near perfect and everyone else like a moron. Likewise, when describing his mistakes he never does anything wrong, everyone else does. We get the unfiltered version of Holden and we need to sort through what he says and find what really happened.
Holden always makes himself out as the victim and he thinks everyone wrongs him. Holden clearly made a mistake in leaving the fencing teams foils on the train. Holden says that …show more content…
Holden goes up to women that he finds pretty, but when they turn him down the become terrible people. Holden believes that he is perfect, so the women must have something wrong with them. Holden’s need to belittle people comes out when the piano player takes a bow after an amazing performance and everyone claps Holden says “ It was very phony - I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he finished” (Salinger 84). Holden just finished listening to a great pianist and everyone clapped for him yet he was a snob and somehow Holden felt bad for him. Holden’s need for feeling like the big man on campus comes from his insecurities and he puts people down to make himself feel big. Holden is very lonely at this time and seeing a room full of people having fun makes him put them all down to make himself seem bigger in his own mind. He uses the phrase moron a lot to belittle people, like when he leaves Pencey he calls everyone morons. Holden got kicked out for bad grades, but the people with good grades are the …show more content…
The real world threatens Holden and whenever things go awry, he declares them phony or someone else's fault. Holden always makes up a reason for what happened when he screws up. When someone does better than him in anything or rejects him, Holden belittles them to make himself feel better. Holden takes his reality and casts it however he sees fit. One of Holden’s biggest complaints with people or things he does not like is that they are phony. The unfiltered mind of Holden turns his account of the story into a phony version in which we hear what he wants us to hear but we need to look past that to decipher the