Holden's Lies

Holden's lies

People lie for reasons, some lies for fun, others to escape from something like the truth. In the

catcher in the rye, we have the main character Holden. He lies a lot because he doesn't want people to

know who he really is. Holden is the way he is because of his brother Allie. After he died he changed

completely , and now he gets a chuckle out of lying which is why he always lies, even openly he admits

that he is a liar.

A kind of lie Holden uses is fooling with people minds. When Holden gets on the train to NYC

from pencey he sits next to a woman whose son was also in pencey. They talk and Holden lies about his

name and told her he was the janitor of pencey. Who lies about their own name? Or he didn't want her

to know who he really was. As they continue talking Ernie came to the conversation and he tells her his

the most popular kid in school Holden also says "well a bunch of us wanted Ernie to be the president of

the class. I mean he was the only boy who could take the job" (pg 57). He was making feel the mother

all proud of something her son wasn't true while in his head he doesn't really like Ernie, Holden thinks

his the biggest bastard that ever went to pencey. He was having fun fooling around with her head.

Holden also lie just to get him out of particular situation, such as when he was at the bar in New

york city and he saw his brothers old girlfriend and she wanted to talk to him. Instead of stay and talk

to her, he lies saying "i was just about to leave", this shows he was trying to avoid something from

talking to her. Because if he wasn't then why not just stay talking to her?

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