Subject: Re: Certainly
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 08 2002 - 10:05:11 GMT
Cecilia:
"pain in the twasane"?
:)
Jim
PS yeah...that's how I see it too. Franny was just like Holden in this
respect -- she probably saw her own phoniness more clearly than Holden did,
though, hence, her "breakdown." Adolescent and melodramatic, yes, but then
she had Zooey around to point that out to her :).
Cecilia Baader wrote:
>
> --- Chris Kubica <ckubica@home.com> wrote:
>
> > I suppose it has something to do with Holden ALSO being a phony,
> > sometimes, without knowing it, eh? Or being phony with Phoebs,
> > one of the kids near HC's crazy cliff?
>
> I've often thought that this is precisely the point: Holden's just as much
> of a phoney as everybody else, he just hates it more. Have you ever heard
> the old cliche, we hate in others that which we hate the most in
> ourselves?
>
> The best example is that scene in the bar where he runs into D.B.'s
> girlfriend and her date. He talks to them, asks them all the expected
> phoney things, even though all the while he's justifying this behavior by
> telling himself that this is what you have to do in order to live in this
> world. Holden's angry, but not angry enough to shuck off the coil of all
> social customs.
>
> He does things like that throughout the novel, but the difference between
> Holden and the rest of the phoneys is that he's self-aware. He doesn't
> want to be like them.
>
> So then the question arises: if this is what Holden is like on the inside
> and this is how he acts on the outside, how can we truly judge anybody?
> You never know what's going on inside somebody's head. That person may be
> wanting to stop kids from falling off a cliff in a wheat field and is just
> making conversation while he works out the details.
>
> And if that's true, then who is really a phoney? You can't make the
> differentiation because you can't ever really know. I mean, look at what
> a little pain in the twasane Holden is to the people around him. Nobody
> would guess in a million years what's going on inside his head. A person
> who made the decision to hate all the phoneys would certainly lump Holden
> in with them and be wrong, no? So then that begs the conclusion that you
> can't hate anybody. You've got to love everybody no matter what they're
> like, sort of like Seymour's fat lady, because maybe we're all Holdens
> inside.
>
> Beautiful, no?
>
> Regards,
> Cecilia.
>
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