Holden's inability to stay consistent with his own ideals shows how childish he really is. In The Catcher in the Rye, Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and confuses him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy. The presence of this separate world is shown through the countless times in the book that he contradicts himself. One such contradiction is his hatred for the movies, but the fact that he still goes to see movies fairly regularly and even uses different movie themes to somehow express how hurt he is show his commonly contradictory nature. "If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me." Later he from makes plans to go to the movies and pretends to be an actor who had just gotten shot in the gut. Holden's ways of describing the adult world are especially interesting. "Phoniness" is one of Holden's favorite concepts. It is his catch all for describing the superficiality, hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world around him. Although Holden uses so much energy searching for phoniness in others, he never directly observes his own phoniness. His deceptions are generally pointless and cruel and he notes that he is a compulsive liar. "Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules." "Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it." Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right-I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game." Holden's clear separation between "sides" in life, implying that the only way to play life as a game is to cheat it, shows that as a child he can't be expected to win anything without being deceitful in doing it. Yet while he claims to shun this way of life away from hi...