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

up.
The night that Allie died, Holden slept in the garage and broke all the windows out with his bare hands from frustration. Holden ended up having to be hospitalized because of it. Allie was only 11 and Holden was just two years older than him. When Holden goes on to describe Allie, he describes him as the golden child. Holden says that he was the most intelligent out of the family. Holden feels that Allie was smarter and kinder than he was, even at a young age. But now that he is dead it puts more pressure on Holden to succeed and set an example for his younger sister Phoebe, when, in fact, he does just the opposite. He gets kicked out of his high school Pencey, starts to drink even though his underage, smokes cigarettes almost every hour, and starts to have interactions with prostitutes.
Throughout the novel, the people who Holden encountered were described as phonies.

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

innocence.
In chapter 25 Holden shows his frustration when he sees something that he thinks should not have been there, “Somebody’d written “Fuck You” on the wall.

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

year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact” (262). This is why Holden wants to be the “Catcher in the Rye” because he doesn't want kids falling into the trap of adulthood. By saving kids, he is able to feel some satisfaction because he’ll know all the trouble he is going to save them from being an adult.
Another example is when a lonely and desperate Holden, accepts the offer of the hotel elevator operator to find him a prostitute. He kept on preparing himself for her, but when she comes, he fails to have sex with her. Instead, Holden wants to just talk. The reason he doesn’t want to have sex with the prostitute is because if he does, then he’ll lose the innocence in himself. He also talks about how looking at Sunny only got him depressed then feeling sexy.
He says, “I know you’re suppose to feel pretty sexy when somebody gets up and pulls their dress over their head, but I didn’t. Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt more depressed than sexy” (123). The reason it depresses Holden is because he sees that the prostitute Sunny is young, maybe his age, and he realizes that there is no way to save her from falling because she already fell through the cliff of preserving her innocence. Encountering people like Sunny is why Holden wants to stand at the end of the cliff and catch whoever falls because he wants to stop kids from realizing the pains of adulthood.
Holden doesn’t want kids to grow up and have to deal with death and losing loved ones like he did with his brother Allie. Throughout this book, we see that Holden has this obsession with children staying young forever. Holden wants to protect every child from growing up in a world filled with adults, who he considers to be impure. He wants kids to stay young forever to avoid the pain which comes with growing up. But, even though he tries his best to fight against the end of innocence in a child, he sees that he is losing. Just like as he describes when he sees the curse words in Phoebe's school, “It’s hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the “Fuck you” signs in the world.”(262) There are too many kids for Holden to save. But even still, everyone has to grow up someday.