It's due today, and my English teacher decided last minute that he wasn't going to proofread it.. So can someone help? :3 As children, we were taught that creativity and imagination were the most valuable things that we could possess. As we grew older through school and into adulthood, these traits were eclipsed by others deemed “More valuable to society”. As Catcher in the Rye, written by J. D. Salinger, continues on, it becomes apparent that the main character, Holden Caulfield, struggles with this transition of life; seemingly never wanting to grow up because of this fact. Not only this, he uses lies and his imagination to solve emotional problems he couldn’t otherwise handle on his own. Holden states several times in the novel that he hates being around most people because they are so “phoney”. By Holden’s skewed logic, it can be derived that he has a profound fear of losing his creative abilities by being thrust into the adult world, and that he uses his imagination as a way of coping. The way Holden expresses his creative intimacy throughout Catcher is frequent, but not always obvious. The first example of this would be "I feel like there should be some kind of good-bye" (pg. 16) as he leaves his last school, Pencey Prep. Here, he is concerned about how realistic his own feelings are, pointing to the first uprising of his imagination connecting him to the world and his own emotions. Holden also speaks of a report he did for his roommate Stradlater, on his late brother, Allie’s, baseball mitt in which poems had been written on the glove. He points out his admiration of the creative spectrums in the world, but also, how much he adored his brother, and how he was emotionally destroyed by his death. At this point in the novel, Stradlater is an important figure because he contrasts Holden in almost every value: unimaginative, sociable, generally accepting of life, and in Holden’s words, “The biggest phoney you’d ever meet”. This contrast is so vital to the story because it gives insight into Holden’s extreme criticism of the world around him, and through the power of his imagination, place anyone into the category of ‘phoney’ as he sees fit. Another trait Holden points out about himself is that he is quite insecure about his intelligence. He says “I’m not half as smart as my younger sister Phoebe...” (Chapter 10) Holden says this because at the beginning of the novel, he is getting kicked out of his 4th prep school. As the novel proceeds on, it is distinctly obvious that his intelligence is very much there, but he simply lacks the motive to complete schoolwork unless it is creatively stimulating; the report card of his last school term is a great example. He failed every class except English, where all he had to do is write creative compositions. Like everyone, Holden has intelligence, but due to his ever persistent need to satisfy his imagination, he does not accomplish much of value in the standards of schoolwork. In the final chapters, he ends up going to a Mental Hospital to help deal with his need to lie and but everything in a fictional tense to deal with life. In my opinion Salinger closed the novel with a hidden question; was Holden actually crazy, or did he just have a less socially acceptable way with coping with his troubles? Is an imagination becoming a despised thing in today’s society? Are all the future Holden’s going to be cast aside because of their differences in thinking? Maybe Holden had a point; the world is just a bunch of phoneys, feeding the next generation all the food of thought their supposed to eat.