Catch the Rye
... make him feel better about himself and him being an insecure teenager. This is Holden’s way of not facing the truth with his friends in class, but to make fun of others and laugh. Ossenburger is the first "phony" Holden goes into detail about. Everything we hear about him reveals hypocrisy. In his profession, for example, Ossenburger runs discount funeral parlors that take advantage of families, though he stresses to the students that they should have “integrity and pray devoutly.” More disturbing to Holden than Ossenburger's phoniness, though, is the school's hypocrisy. None of the speeches would occur if Ossenburger hadn't given Pencey money to buy a new dorm. This says that money everything, and all of the parades that occurred would not have happened if it wasn’t for Ossenburger’s money, not Ossenburger himself. Ossenburger, according to Holden, is phony because he buys friendship with his money, not his heart. In chapter 7, Holden himself often has a strained, sarcastic phoniness, either as a joke or when he is upset with someone. When Ackley refuses to let Holden sleep in his roommate's empty bed after he is beat-up, Holden calls him "a real prince" and gives him a phony handshake. So, Holden might now always say out loud to the persons face that he/she is a phony, but his actions and thoughts show it as we look into his mind reading this novel. "I hate the movies like a poison, but I get a bang imitating them." (pg. 29) Holden says this about movies, because he thinks that they are very phony. Movies are one of Holden's big pet peeves because of their “fake emotions and stereotyped roles.” However, that quote above does not show that Holden fully “hates” movies. He still gets a “bang imitating them.” So, with that quote, it shows that Holden is a hypocrite to his own sayings in that he hates movies, but still gets a bang imitating them. That right there shows how Holden can be considered a...