Catcher In The Rye Analysis

“The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.” This is an excerpt from “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz”, a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeat’s. Eva and Con were two sisters whose beauty had entranced a young Yeats. They are remembered in the poem as “Two girls in silk kimonos, both/beautiful.” As both girls become active in politics and the women’s suffrage movement they become exposed to the corrupted reality of life. The problems the two sisters endure eventually strip away their physical and spiritual beauty. Yeat’s poem indicates that time brings new and bad experiences. Experiences that strip beauty and innocence away from people. This is a recurring theme in the classic novel, The Catcher in the Rye, by

He begins to tell his story while undergoing treatment in a mental hospital. Holden starts his narrative on a Saturday at the Pencey prep school in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. This is the fourth school that Holden is expelled from due to not meeting academic requirements. Since Holden is not scheduled to return home until Wednesday, he decides to stay in Manhattan for three days without telling his parents. While living on his own, Holden tries to retain his innocence as he witnesses the vulgar and repulsing actions of adults in the real world. Holden’s attributes make him susceptible to this level of explicitness. In, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s attempt to protect himself from the adult world, to stop himself from growing up, and to preserve purity are all characteristics that develop the theme of

He explains how he ended up at the very bottom in life, and that there is no happy ending. Author J.D. Salinger is able to get the theme of innocence across by the characterization that attributes Holden, such as his attempt to protect himself from the adult world, to stop himself from growing up, and to preserve purity. Although Salinger does not explicitly state that innocence is a theme, it can be assumed by the characterization in the novel. Holden makes the comment, ‘what really knocks me out is a book, that when you're all done reading it, you wish that the author who wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it (Salinger 18).” But Holden’s mistake is that a book is not its author. Therefor the theme of this story can not be found within J.D. Salinger but within the text. Holden may not have been in any war battles, but he takes the reader through battles of his own. In the text, the items and objects that hold symbolic meaning, can be a way that Holden gets the reader to see the world through his eyes, to empathize, and to make the conclusion that this classic novel is revolved around