Essay On Loss Of Innocence In Catcher In The Rye

Can One be Afraid to Grow Up?

From the moment a young child observes the privileges adults have in the world, they cannot wait for the day when they grow up. On the contrary, Holden Caulfield has no desire to grow up because his introverted personality protects him from the fear of the loss of innocence. Throughout the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, the J.D. Salinger utilizes symbolism, discouraging imagery, and colloquial diction to make the reader be aware of Holden’s fear of the loss of youth. Holden, although he is only seventeen when he is narrating his story, he speaks as though he is an old man remembering his youth.

Throughout the novel represents Holden’s fear of the loss of one’s purity and how he yearns to aid others in need of saving from the world around them. Sometimes the most important symbol in a book is right in front of one’s eyes, for example the title of the book. When Holden sneaks into his parent’s apartment to speak to his younger sister Phoebe, he tells her that he imagines “standing on the edge of some crazy cliff” and what he has to do is “catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff” (173). In this, “everybody” represents childhood, and the “cliff” is the fall of innocence. To the reader it seems as if Holden not only wants to save others from falling out of innocence, but he wants to also save himself. As Holden grew older, he had to tackle hardships for example, his brother, Allie passing away from cancer. From this experience, an enormous chunk of his innocence was taken away from his as long as his mindset of growing up; He believes that as one gets older, pieces and pieces of innocence will fall out of them and that is why he has always had a fantasy of saving others from the fear that Holde...

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...is phony because he believes that they take away innocence from people. For instance, Holden would agree that the families that paid Ossenburger money to bury their families for nothing had their innocence taken away by him.

Ultimately, Holden Caulfield is a dynamic character due to the fact that he goes from being very anxious about growing up, but learns that in the end, one has to go through that point in life at some time. Throughout the novel, the audience feels sympathy towards Holden because of the hardships he had to go through such as the death of the one person he looked up to. This single death triggered the fear Holden had for a very long time which made his label everyone as phony and isolate himself from the world around him. Although Holden was scared to grow up, he had already matured because of the adversity he confronted. Thus, not everyone