The world today is very deceptive and bogus. JD Salinger's well-known novels, The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey attack this false and superficial society that manifests itself through the lives, ideas, actions and words expressed by the characters in these literary works. The transition from childhood to adolescence and adulthood is inevitable. The protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield goes through this stage and finds himself in crisis. He distances himself from everyone around him and does his best not to grow up. Holden often looks back on his childhood and the life he led with his family. Franny in Franny and Zooey is already past this stage but struggles to live in a world where everyone around her only cares about outward appearances. In these worlds, the two characters, Holden and Franny, reveal their struggle to grow up and try to live as adults in a world full of deception and superficial people who only care about appearances. From the protagonists' perspective, the adult world that Holden and Franny enter and live in is a very superficial place. Holden, aged sixteen, is going through a crisis period where he is almost forced to become an adult. This concept is precisely what scares Holden, causing him to misbehave at school. His last school, Pencey Prep, expels Holden due to his poor grades. When asked the reason for his lack of academic enthusiasm, Holden simply states that he is not interested in anything. In every school he attended, Holden managed to find different reasons to not care and maybe even hate the institutions. “I didn’t really fail or anything. I just stopped, sort of. One of the main reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by pretense... On Sundays, for example, old Haas would go and shake everyone's parents' hands when they were visiting at school. I mean, if a boy's mom was kind of fat or nerdy or something, and if someone's dad was one of those guys that wears those suits with big shoulders, then old Haas would fit them hand and give them a fake smile and then he would talk, for maybe half an hour, with someone else's parents.