Holden Caulfield Innocence

We all have our different ways of mourning, for some it can last days while for others it can last a few months or even a few years. In the book “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, we are introduced to the protagonist Holden Caulfield, who loses his younger brother Allie to Leukemia and never seems to get over it. Holden sees childhood as a time of only innocence and the only thing a child receives from reaching adulthood is death. When Allie dies young, he was stopped from reaching adulthood, and in Holden’s mind stays forever as innocent and a carefree child. This is why Holden is afraid to grow up and hates the corruption of innocence, he always describes Allie as perfection because Allie never had to go through the pain of growing

For example; Stradlater (Holden’s former roommate), Mr. Antolini (Holden’s former teacher), Sunny (the prostitute), and even his other brother DB Caulfield. DB represented the phoniness the Holden hates because he was a writer in Hollywood. He writes for movies, lives in a fake city filled with fake people, and Holden sees him as a sell-out, nothing compared to their young brother Allie. The only way you were not a phony is if you were a kid. Holden loved kids because of their innocence: genuine, caring, and naturally kindhearted. This is why when he talks with Phoebe about one thing that he likes a lot, he reveals that he wants to be the “Catcher in the Rye.” He pictures a lot of children playing in a big field of rye around the edge of a cliff. Holden imagines that he would catch them if they started to go over the cliff and save “thousands of little kids.” Him imagining himself stopping kids from going over the edge is his way of stopping kids from falling into “adulthood” and losing their childhood

It drove me damn near crazy. I thought about how Pheobe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them-all cockeyed, naturally-what it meant” (260). Holden gets angry when he sees the words there because he doesn’t think kids are old enough to look at those words, let alone understand what they mean. He got so frustrated that he even threatens to “kill whodever’d written it” (260). When he sees the curse words, he immediately seeks adults to blame for it. He believes that the only reason it’s there is because adults are the ones who corrupt the innocence of a child. He even describes the adult who he thinks wrote the curse words as a “peverty bum that’d sneaked into the school late at night to take a leak or something” (260). He feels adults only want to destroy peaceful things, even his own death and funeral. As he goes on to describe, “That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what