The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence and the Cliff Malynda W. J.D. Salinger and WWII The Catcher in the Rye is a best-selling book that was never adapted into a movie. J.D Salinger’s work is timeless. He masterfully created relatable characters to tell an amazing story about growing up and life. The whole plot of the book is that Holden Caulfield, the main character, has just been expelled from a prestigious prep school and is traveling back home through New York.
However it is the language and character development that makes this book one of the best loved pieces of literature ever. Seven years before The Catcher in the Rye was published, J.D. Salinger had just returned from horrors that very few people, fortunately, ever face. In World War II, he was on Utah Beach on D-Day, he was also in the Battle of the Bulge and Hürtgen Forest, and he was one of the first to enter a liberated concentration camp. Therefore it is no wonder that his masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye , is deeply concerned with the destruction of innocence and the cliff of adulthood and pain. The terrors that he saw caused him to realize what humans are capable of and why children need to be protected from it.
Innocence Deserves Protection Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s main protagonist seeks to be a “Catcher in the Rye”, catching children from plummeting off of the cliff into the corruption of adulthood. This fact that he believes to be true causes him to attempt talking to someone who listens to his fears about becoming an adult and losing his innocence. However, throughout the novel, he tries repeatedly to achieve this, but the only person who listens to him has ulterior motives. Holden believes that adulthood is the opposite of innocence, and that the two cannot exist together. He wants to stop time to keep himself and all who he cares about away from the phony and corrupt world that inevitably he believes will engulf everyone. The novel firmly believes that children deserve our protection. The novel uses many different metaphors to convey this. For example, when Holden is explaining the composition that he wrote for his roommate, he recalls the baseball glove that his brother, Allie, had. The quote below is a metaphor to show that innocence, the childish game of baseball and the innocent love of poetry, dies when the pain of adulthood, disease, occurs, Overall, the novel believes that the adult world corrupts the naive bliss of children, causing them to need Holden, their Catcher in the Rye. Holden embarks on the noble yet fruitless mission to save the innocent from hurtling off of the cliff of adulthood by stopping time.
“I wrote about my brother Allie's baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It really was. My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died.”