I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it.
I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by.
Holden sees through phoniness while others accept it. Generalizing in this way, setting himself apart, can make him feel better about his own idiosyncrasies and low self-esteem, giving him a sense that he is better than the mass of people, who fail to notice what he perceives. Holden is not like other “people” the world is against him. Many of the most famous lines in Salinger's novel begin with the word “People.” For Holden, the word marks Holden's attempt to separate himself from others. The more alienated and lonely Holden becomes, the more he recedes into his own fantasies, yet he recognizes that seeking pleasure through this kind of imagination is just “crazy,” not an authentic way to temper the pain he feels. A single “pretty” thing launches fantasies of love. Here, Holden reflects on the adolescent male’s (or perhaps most males’, most people’s) tendency to overreach, to create relationships in their minds on the basis of a single seemingly genuine encounter. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. Yet, the reality is that he never brings this mania into practice sex without love can be at best a temporary release of the pain of loneliness. In his mind, Holden suggests, he is fantasizing constantly about sex, and his friend suggests that the “typical Caulfield conversation” is preoccupied with sex. The intensity of his raging adolescent hormones makes him think that somehow sex would be joined with that same depth of love for a another person, though in reality sex comes all too easily with money rather than authentic feeling. Holden wants to feel the deepest type of love possible, the love that died when he lost his sibling years ago. One of Holden's greatest internal quandaries regards how to resolve the paradox of love and sex. In my mind, I'm probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw.
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