All That David Copperfield Kind of Crap

If by "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" Holden means all the unfortunate circumstances and happenings surrounding David Copperfield, then I guess he's a total hypocrite. That's Holden though, he sits from afar judging everyone without actually judging himself. He does it because he can't face his "inadequacies", and that is part of the reason why he gets kicked out of so many schools. He spends most of the story complaining about people and how they're all "phonies", and has this grand scenario where he will go away and live as a logger or something. The more I think about it Holden isn't very different from Pip. They both have a "tale of woe", and they both go through life trying to rid themselves of their inadequacies and reach this final destination that it turns out they don't really want anyway. Pip realizes the truth about the world, and Holden realizes that what he wanted all along was to be innocent again and not know the truth about "phonies". The difference between Pip and Holden is that even though they both have expectations about the world and people, Holden is miserably in the present with both feet stuck in reality while Pip still has his wild imagination.

Dickens style is really distinguished by his characters and their impossible situations, and the imagination that comes from that. Salinger tried to separate his characters from Dickens because he wanted them to be real characters that you would find in everyday life to parallel everything Holden hates about phonies. This made his novel seem more realistic and made Holden even more blunt and disillusioned.