The story begins as Holden is being expelled from Pency, a preppy high school overflowing with showy, artificial "phonies". To Holden, everyone is living a life totally different from who and what they are, just to please other people. The world seems blind to reality, and Holden wants to stop it. After he realizes that a person cannot be changed, he seems to just give up. Not wanting to go home, (out of fear of his bizarre parents), and having nowhere else to go, Holden lingers about the city of New York, wandering around in the day, and going to bars, lying about his age, and getting drunk at night. He observes his surroundings, (although the alcohol kind of blurs it a bit...) and is constantly reminded of all the pretending going on in the world, as if everybody is an actor in a play. Holden believes that people lose their innocence and sense of reality when they grow out of childhood. He tells his sister, "...I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in!
             this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff-I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy..." He wants to save people from falling off the cliff of reality and into the world of deceitful seduction. The only thing Holden does not realize, is that he, himself, is the true epitome of "phony".
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