The Catcher in the Rye: A Struggle to Preserve Innocence
Adolescence is a crossroads for many, there is the natural gravitation toward adulthood as that is the next logical step in life, or for others, like Holden Caufield, it is means never growing up. William Faulkner once said ‘The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.’ This applies to Holden at his core. He is a teenager struggling to balance his need for preserving childhood innocence and his desire to become an adult. In contrast to all adults whom Holden sees as riddled with flaws and phoniness, he sees children as pure, gentle, innocent, and perfect – frozen in time. His need to become the protector of the innocent or the “catcher in the rye” is deeply rooted in the traumatic loss of his younger brother Allie, along with his own fears of changing and growing up. This is what drives him to protect Phoebe and Jane as he might feel that if he can protect two people he loves from the thing he fears most, he can also protect himself.
Holden was traumatized by the death of his brother Allie, sensitizing him to the reality of unjust death and suffering. His family’s impersonal approach to Holden’s expression of grief may have been an important contributing factor in the way he deals with figures of threatened innocence. Jane’s interactions with Holden occur a summer apart from the death of his brother. Holden states that ‘She was the only one, outside [his]
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family, that [he] ever showed Allie's baseball mitt to’ (Salinger, 77). By doing this, we understand that Holden relates these two people and thinks of them both in pure, idealistic terms. Holden describes both Jane and Allie in only positive terms, the two share similar qualities that Holden admires like intelligence and kindness and so Jane becomes another reminder of Allie, another person Holden seeks to protect. His protection of Phoebe is also ignited by the loss of his brother. They both share strikingly similar hair colour and she is also a close sibling making the connection close to home for him. Holden’s need to protect phoebe is exemplified by his obsession over the “f*** you” written on the wall of her school. To Holden, it demonstrates that the innocent world of children has already been infected by the profanities of the adulthood. Allie was taken away by the evils of the adult world and Holden fears the same will happen for Phoebe’s innocence and even describes how he would kill the person responsible by “smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody” (201). His violent and almost gruesome description of killing the perpetrator is all part of his desperate quest to maintain the childlike innocence he so longs for himself, he proclaims himself to be a pacifist yet he will break his rules to protect what he cherishes most. Allie’s death left Holden struggling to understand why the world would do something so cruel to such a sweet and innocent boy which eventually lead to his issues with death, the adult world and growing up. Jane and Phoebe both resemble exactly what Allie did, and in that way, Holden feels he has to them to maintain their innocence and shield them from the ugliness of adulthood.

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Holden’s symbolic dream of being the catcher in the rye is tied to his own anxieties with growing up. His idea of protection and his attempts to preserve Phoebe and Jane’s innocence is an extension of his own fears. Jane Gallagher is one of the only girls his own age that Holden actually likes and as the novel progresses, Jane becomes a symbol of threatened innocence for Holden. However, he chooses to stay away from her and states that he is “not in the mood” (105) to call her. His aversion of Jane is not to protect her innocence but to protect his own. If he does not call her, she remains in the same state he loved her in. She remains the child he knew her as, not as the woman she has become. Jane is yet another way Holden clings to the past and is a method he uses to prevent himself from growing up. Jane may have already ‘fallen’ from the cliff into adulthood and out of innocence, but Phoebe still has a while to go. The way Phoebe switches between acting like a child and an adult is reminiscent of Holden himself, which is an indication that Phoebe is a younger version of Holden, leading him to actively protect her from the world he fears. When thinking about her going to the museum, he tells us about how he “thought how she'd see the same stuff [he] used to see, and how she'd be different every time she saw it.” (122). He even mentions how he is slightly depressed by this thought, suggesting that he fears the ways in which Phoebe will change and grow up. The Museum of Natural History is a safe haven for Holden, it is where time stands still and comparing Phoebe’s visits to his own yet again indicates that Holden seeks to maintain his younger sister’s innocence as a method to maintain his own.
In summation, Holden’s need to protect figures like Jane and Phoebe from adulthood is deeply rooted in his own issues of loss. It is a source of comfort for Holden.
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He believes that by protecting the ones he loves, he can protect himself from experiencing those feelings of loss and helplessness. His brother’s death coupled with his fear of growing up yields a mess of emotions that he cannot sort out. Holden tries to take control of this mess by projecting his troubles onto Phoebe and Jane and commits himself to ‘preserving’ their innocence.