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

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

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