Even Holden, a self-proclaimed exhibitionist, is an actor in search of an audience. This comment, which appears in Chapter 17, is prompted by the famous actor couple, the Lunts, whom Holden and Sally see perform during their date.
He seems to believe that performance and talent somehow corrupt the performer and that success will turn a person into a showoff or a phony. This belief may also help explain why Holden continues to fail out of school: he is afraid that academic success will corrupt him. Ace your assignments with our guide to The Catcher in the Rye! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Antolini Mr. Spencer Stradlater Carl Luce. What is a catcher in the rye and why does Holden want to be one?
Does Mr. Antolini really make a pass at Holden? However, I feel like when Holden tries to put on the happy mask, he ends up doing things without thinking them through, just to cover up the sadness.
This habit of his is not very healthy. I think that in order for him to reach a state of calmness, he must be vulnerable. Because of this, I think that the blue mask best reflects Holden, because it is what he is truly feeling, not the phony, happy mood as portrayed in the other mask. Friday, May 4, Ch. In Chapter 17, Holden takes Sally on a date to a theater show. The particular show they saw feature the Lunts , a famous acting couple.
After the first act, Holden describes to us his weird obsession with the phony-ness of actors. He even has trouble explaining it.
This isn't the first time that holden has talked about his dislike of actors, and definitely not the first time he has talked about his hatred of phonies. In chapter 16 when Holden is buying the tickets for the show, he tells us about how he not only dislikes movie actors, but stage actors as well.
Here's what he tells us: They never act like people Some good actors do slightly act like people, but not in a way that's fun to watch Actors that are really good, know they're good, which spoils it. In the show he takes Sally to, Holden has problems getting interested with the characters.
But he tells us that the Lunts are different from other actors because they didn't act like people or actors. He then goes on to contradict himself about how they were too good at accurately portraying people talking and interrupting each other which, in turn, made them not that good because they would start showing off. I'm just sitting here reading this trying to understand what it really is that Holden is trying to say.
There is a reason that J. Salinger includes this mild rant about the Lunts. Holden says that they're so good that they know they're celebrities and they start showing off. Holden just flat out can't accept anyone being something that isn't themselves.
Even if actors portray people, they are still acting. Something that holden can't get over. It's almost as if the Lunts put on a mask when they go on stage, and Holden fails to connect with them as they're characters because he knows what's behind the mask, people who he thinks are full of themselves, phonies. The picture to the left shows drama masks, commonly used symbols for theater.
While the origin of these masks is completely unrelated, I can't help but look at them and think of Holden. While he's in New York he seems to wear the happy mask around other people and strangers. Whether it's trying to have fun and dance with girls and have drinks or trying to have a good time with people like Sally, he acts like nothing is bothering him. But because we're in Holden's mind the whole novel, we know which mask is really how he is feeling.
He actually takes off his happy mask and expresses his real thoughts at the end of the chapter which I won't get into because Caleb's got it covered. A less professional example of authenticity is the kid on the street. He is "swell" because he goes his own way. The parents are on the sidewalk, but the kid marches along the street, next to the curb, singing, "If a body catch a body coming through the rye. For Holden, this is pure, innocent, and real, a living example of art for art's sake although he does not state it that way.
The performance is the better because neither the kid nor Holden, his only audience, takes it very seriously. The event brightens Holden's day. The scene is even more significant because it foreshadows Salinger 's revelation of the central metaphor of the novel, the source of the novel's title, in Chapter In contrast are movies and the theater.
It "depresses hell" out of Holden when people make too much of going to a movie, especially when they form lines all the way down the block. Live performances are just as bad.
He hates Broadway, and he hates actors, even the so-called "great" performers like Sir Laurence Olivier. When D. He thought that Olivier was handsome and had a great voice but acted more like a general than a "sad, screwed-up" guy struggling to find his way, which is what he thought the play was supposed to be about.
Holden usually does not enjoy performances because he is concerned that the actors will do something phony at almost any moment. Even if an actor is good, Holden thinks the actor acts as though he knows he's good and ends up pandering to the audience the way Ernie does when he plays the piano. Audiences usually can't distinguish between phony and authentic, as Holden sees it, and applaud at all the wrong times. The chapter's other major theme is the mutability of time and its relationship to death.
At the park, Holden runs into a schoolmate of Phoebe's who suggests that Holden's sister might be at the museum, "the one with the Indians. He attended Phoebe's school when he was her age and toured the same museum.
He likes to think that the museum would be pretty much the same if he visits it now, but it bothers him to think that he has changed.
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