Susan Watkins -- Outside Reading 4

This semester I read the novel Catcher in the Rye for the first time. The main character, Holden Caufield, is pretty fascinating and the whole book is narrated from his first-person perspective. Holden is a teenager who is pretty disillusioned with the world, full of jumbled monologues and self-contradicting streams of consciousness. He has opinions on just about everything, but if he doesn't, isn't afraid to say so.

One of the things Holden talks about is movies. Generally speaking, he says he doesn't like them at all because they are "phony." He refers to how the actors don't actually feel what they pretend to, and the stories they tell never actually happened, and sometimes the places aren't real. He hates phony things, people, and events more than just about anything else. In fact, the whole book he is searching for authenticity high and low. However, sometimes authenticity approaches him and he fails to connet with it or even, sometimes, runs from it. I think Holden is an example of someone who knows there are truths in life that are deeper than the surface events and objects around us. However, he's scared by the prospect of the unknown and seems to understand that if he were to really tap into those deeper truths and experience the mysterium of our spirits, he might find himself thrown into tremendum as well. For him, it's a fear that holds him back during the time period of the book-- however I think we all have to face this fear at some point or another, or run the risk of "being" without "living."