Imaginative Piece 1

"We Rely on others to tell us who we are"

Piss off Pencey.  “Everyone is an individual”. Pure bullcrap if you ask me. No one at this school is an individual. No one is themselves in this place, everyone is told to be someone that they don’t want to be because they want to be seen as one of the hotshots; so that their life can just be a game. Don’t even worry about “kicking me out”, I was going to leave anyway. The people, the teachers, even the way that “we eat the same food every Saturday night,” I had already packed my bags. The way the people act around everyone else compared to how they act when no one is around just shows how the students of Pencey are pure “phonies”. Especially Stradlater.

He fits the role perfectly. When he is alone, all he does is mope around relishing in his true personality of being a “secret slob.”  However, when he is out with his friends, he tries to act all cool pouting his big chest fuelled with his big ego, adamantly displaying his bravado. Thinking he is better than the rest of us because he wants to impress his mates. Just like when he went out with Jane Gallagher, I told him several stories about her and he subtly acted uninterested and all he did was ask me to complete his English assignment for him. How does an egotistical boy like him, get a date with such a flattering woman like her? When he got back from his little play-date, all he did was insult me. How can a man whom people believe to be such a leader, and someone whom we should aspire to be like, not even do their own assignments, but then have the audacity to dismiss my hard work as crap. [lights up a cigarette] this will set him straight, Stradlater hates it when I smoke in the room, or so he’s told me. Its hard to tell in this paradox school whether someone truly likes or dislikes anything. Even when I approach him about “Jean”, friendly asking a question, about my ex-girlfriend Jane, he doesn’t tell me anything. Every inch of my body boiled with anger and hatred, I felt like the only person at Pencey who wasn’t a phony, the loneliest person at Pencey. Stradlater ducks and comes back at me after attempting to connect against his jaw with my flurrying fists. Somehow I ended up with the bloody nose, but I don’t care. I’m glad I got expelled; no one is themselves at this stupid school.

I don’t understand the need for popularity, all they do is get known by more people and eventually become so engaged in popularity that their grades start to drop off and so have a negative attitude in life, which hinders their future ambitions instead of if they had have focused on being themselves.

Why do people judge me just because I am not a hotshot like them, bloody phoneys more like it. They don’t know me, they don’t know anything about my life, and so they shouldn’t ever try and judge me. I depict who I am, and who I want to be, not them, I am the Catcher in the Rye.