How Does Holden Expresses A Nostalgia For Innocence

Albert Camus once said “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. As people grow and begin to experience a loss of innocence and their child-like mindset disappears they may revolt against the things they once enjoyed or even the normal life they had to express the way they wish things were before they were exposed to any of the grievances the world has to offer. In the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” written by J.D Salinger, Holden Caulfield lives an unconventional life style bouncing from school to school and never feeling quite like he belongs. As Holden grows older he becomes jaded towards life itself and doesn’t know how to express himself using his words, instead he turns to acting

out, lying and running away from any help he is offered. The nostalgia Holden experiences throughout the novel represents his longing for an age of innocence.

Holden’s life changed forever after Allie passed away. The idea of grief counseling wasn’t really something that appealed to him or anyone at the time for the matter, so he never got to deal with his younger brothers passing. Instead Holden let his feelings for Allie control the rest of his life and would speak to his brother as a way of feeling better after something had “depressed” him. “What I did, I started talking, sort of out loud, to Allie. I do that sometimes when I get very depressed. I keep telling him to go home and get his bike and meet me in front of Bobby Fallon's house. Bobby Fallon used to live quite near us in Maine.” (Salinger 98). Holden would speak to Allie out loud as a way of trying to feel better because he knew that he had felt good about things before Allie passed away and he wanted to try to get back to that place he used to be in. Baldwin once said “Holden’s memories of Allie continue to haunt him due to never being brought up. It wouldn’t be so bad if Allie weren’t in that ‘crazy cemetery’ surrounded by tombstones. The author of that piece is trying to convey the idea that Holden would be ok if Allie weren’t dead or even if he didn’t have to know he was sitting dead in the ground. Holden’s reaction to all things related to Allie is always unpredictable you never know if he’s going to use his brother to feel better or if it is just going to make him feel bad and experience a case of “survivors guilt”. Even though the subject of his brother is hard thing for him to deal with looking back on memories he has with Allie always makes him feel better because that time of his life was so great and is something he wants to feel again some day.
Even with the little bits of information Holden gives us throughout the novel about Allie it is clear that he played a major role in his life before and even more so after he dies.

The way Holden speaks about him just portrays how much he meant to him. One of the first things he says about Allie is “He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. […] God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair”(Salinger 38). Holden seems to connect innocence to Allie and he feels like his was taken away from him when he passed away. The more Holden speaks about his brother the better it makes him feel because instead of drowning in the pool of despair he constantly feels he is in, he can look back on a happier time and feel some sort of relief. Some think that “Holden does not refuse to grow up so much as he agonizes over the state of being grown up”(Galloway 79-80). Some of the hesitancy he has over growing up stems from his childhood, he had been so naive to all the horrors of the world and he had fresh eyes to view life with but after the death of Allie his mind seemed to almost stop growing with him and everything that “normal” kids would want to do as they grew older seemed to become very hard for him like how he could never follow through with a sexual act with anyone no matter who it was. Allies dying stunted Holden’s growth in all ways because he just wanted to

return to the time he had with his brother where he felt more secure.

Growing up is a hard thing for anyone to do, it comes with new responsibility, you are expected to act a certain way and it becomes harder to ask for help due to the fact that you want to show everyone that you are capable of handling yourself.

Holden struggles to grow up throughout the entirety of the novel, its not so much that his appearance isn’t older its that his mindset is still much of a younger teenagers and the fact that he doesn’t want to accept that he is maturing and some of the innocence he once had is being taken from him. Holden even says, “Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that's impossible, but it's too bad anyway” (Sallinger121). When Holden says that he is referring to children being put into glass cases so that they can never grow up, he wants to preserve their innocence and make sure they never have to feel the way he does about growing up especially Phoebe. Even though Holden’s idea of putting the kids into glass cases sounds like something evil he means well. Holden just wants to preserve their young mind frame forever so they can always have a good outlook on the world. Although Holden isn’t to fond of having to lose some of the innocence he once carried with him it is clear that the “urgency of Holden's compulsions, his messianic desire to guard innocence against adult corruption, for example, comes of a frantic need to save his

sister from himself”(Bryan 89). Holden wants to protect Phoebe in the way that no one could protect him because he seems to think that the more innocence you have the better life will be because you will be able to avoid thinking and knowing about the horrible things that could happen.
Throughout the novel Holden keeps flashing back to different points in his life to tell stories about people he cared about, things that upset him, and things that once made him happy, these flashbacks go back to a time where he still had the innocence he loved before it was ripped away from him after his brother passed away from cancer. Growing up and maturing is difficult for anyone but Holden Caulfield felt lost and angry at the world for exposing him and any other children to anything harmful it made him resent almost anyone and be afraid to do the things kids his age were doing. The nostalgia for a better time he experienced throughout the novel was so strong and prevalent it made you wish you could help him understand that he could feel better if he would get help, which is eventually what happens to him. Everyone experiences a lose of innocence in life no matter what they do but everyone has the choice whether or not they want to let that be their downfall or they want to embrace there new style of thinking