How Does Holden Alienate Himself

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger focus on a sixteen year old boy named Holden Caulfield. He begins his story rapping up his career at Pencey prep; which he is flunking out of. You learn that he has been kicked out of many boarding schools for his lack of performance in his classes. Holden only acceled in one class while at school which is writing. Holden is writing his story a year later from a treatment facility in California which is likely to be a mental hospital or a sanatorium. Holden is complex often separating himself from his peers feeling no need to find a common ground with them because it would be a waste of his time. He alienates himself, fearing outside harm and being disappointed by all the phonies that he is surrounded

Holden protects himself from all the phoniness by alienating himself from everyone. Although he desperately wants to connect with someone. He uses isolation as proof that he is better than everyone else thus not seeing it necessary to interact with them. Holden uses the fact that everyone is a phony to alienate himself to avoid interactions with others that overwhelm him. To Holden phoniness is describe the superficiality, hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world around him. Holden searches for phoniness in other, but he never directly observes his own phoniness. By deceiving almost every person he mets for little to no reason. He shows the ultimate act of phoniness creating alternate names for himself when he meets people. In chapter 8 he met Mrs. Marrow the mother of one of his classmates whom he was sitting next to on the bus to New York. He tells her his name is Rudolph Schmidt, then proceeds to tell her how great of a guy her son is although he is a jerk. He tells her he is leaving Prency to have an operation on a tumor in his brain. He attempts to explain he reasoning for lying to Mrs.