How Does Holden Protect Children's Innocence

In J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield returns to his hometown, where he goes on an adventure to answer the questions he has about life. After being kicked out of his third boarding school, Holden Caulfield spends three days alone in New York.While in New York, Holden constantly thinks about his old friend Jane Gallagher, who Holden’s old roommate just went on a date with the night Holden left Pencey Prep School. He also meets up with his little sister Phoebe and takes her to the zoo to ride on the carousel. One of the many things that the reader is exposed to during Holden’s adventure is his desire to protect the innocent. Holden constantly mentions how little kids are corrupted by the phony adult society and how he would

One of the ways that Salinger shows Holden’s desire to protect children 's’ innocence is through the graffiti Holden sees at Phoebe’s school. Holden visits Phoebe’s school to deliver a note to her, and while he is there he “saw something that drove [him] crazy somebody’d written ‘Fuck you’ on the wall… [He] thought how Phoebe and all the other kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and finally some dirty kid would tell them-all … what it meant, and how they’d think about it and maybe worry about it for a couple of days” (Salinger 221). The “fuck you” written on the wall angers Holden because it is written in a place that he feels is supposed to protect children, and he feels the “fuck you” will ruin them. If the children see the graffiti and find out what it means they cannot unlearn what it means, making them forever corrupted. When Holden wipes off the “fuck you” he is protecting the kids from “all the negative things that [he] wants children to be protected from,” which is what the graffiti represents (Alsen). Holden is eliminating the thing that will corrupt some children making him the protector of their