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The Road to Acceptance “I could get a job at the filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody.” This is a passage from The Catcher in the Rye which is a novel by J.D Salinger about a teenage boy, Holden Caufield, who is moving towards a mental break down. The novel is about Holden’s “Odyssey” through New York in search of his true self and acceptance from society. Through his “Odyssey” you can see Holden on a downward spiral gaining momentum as he falls due to his problems. Holden is a very disturbed teenager. He thinks the world and almost everything in it is “phony.” He rejects the world around him because of its “phoniness” and fantasizes about his own world. When he meets people, he gives them fake identities to protect himself from exposing his true identity. This indicates that he regards himself as someone that the society rejects. He thinks that society doesn’t accept him and that he is a “reject” and as a form of defense, he rejects society and tries to escape it. Jim Steele is an identity that Holden likes to use a lot. In chapter 10, he uses the name Jim S