Catcher In The Rye :: essays research papers

In JD Salingers Catcher in the Rye, a troubled teenager named Holden Caufield struggles with the fact that everyone has to grow up. The book gets its title from Holdens constant bushel with the loss of innocence. He did not want children to grow up because he felt that adults are corrupt. This is seen when Holden tries to erase naughty words from the w whollys of an elementary school where his young sister Phoebe attended. "While I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebodyd written Fuck you on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I fantasy how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how theyd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them- all cockeyed, naturally- what it meant, and how theyd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoeverd written it. I figure it was some perverty bum thatd sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or someth ing and then wrote it on the wall. I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how Id smash his head on the stone steps till hew as good and goddam dead and bloody." (201) His sibylline concern with impeccability caused him to create stereotypes of a hooligan that would try to corrupt the children of an elementary school. Holden believed that children were innocent because they viewed the world and society without any bias. When Phoebe asked him to name something that he would homogeneous to be when he grew up, the only thing he would have liked to be was a "catcher in the rye." He invented an illusion for himself of a extraneous fantasy. He stated that he would like to follow a poem by Robert Burns "If a body catch a body comin through and through the rye." He kept "picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobodys around- nobody big, I mean- except me. And Im standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean if theyre running and they dont look where theyre going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.