Phoniness

In the Catcher in the Rye, a recurring image is Holden's perception of the world around him - adult society - is one that I find extremely interesting. It highlights the falsehood and hypocrisy of humanity, as well as the pretentiousness of everyone we encounter. Even though Holden wants to be perceived as the odd one out in the crowd of liars and cheats, he too prides himself in being able to lie very well, and a lot of the faults he sees and criticises in other people can very much apply to him too.

Personally, I find the concept of phoniness, unfortunately, something natural in human society in general. Everyone has a social persona in different situations, simplifying an extremely complicated human being into a categorisable box for others to label. As we have seen in French (in Espèce Fabulatrice by Nancy Huston), people apply 'masks' in social situations.
I believe it is a human necessity to simplify one's personality to be put into a box. In general we like labeled boxes categorising everyone and everything around us into simple concepts.
It is something we are taught when we are young, for example by Disney films, to distinguish between Good and Evil, Beautiful and Ugly, and Smart and Stupid. In reality everything is extraordinarily more complicated, yet we still try to categorise, creating images we perceive to be reasonable, yet are completely false in reality. This creates a large difference between Reality and Society, which isn't evident to a child's eye. However when we start to mature and understand the world better we notice all the falseness, all the phoniness around us. And we become part of it.