Someone once said, “The hardest part of growing up is letting go of what you were used to, and moving forward with something you’re not.” In the novel The Catcher in The Rye by J.D. Salinger, the main character Holden Caulfield spends two long days in the city where he finds himself taking every opportunity he can get to avoid change. Through the use of symbolism, Salinger demonstrates that Holden struggles to accept adulthood throughout The Catcher in The Rye, which conveys the pain of losing innocence.
Salinger portrays Holden as struggling to face adulthood through the use of symbolism to express the message that it is difficult to leave childhood behind. Before his date with Sally Hayes, Holden decides that he will try and track down Phoebe, his perfect sister, when he finds himself reminiscing about the Museum of Natural History. He says he has been there many times, and he and Phoebe “had this teacher, Miss Aigletinger, that took us there damn near every Saturday.”(133) Holden is obviously very fond of the museum for many reasons, but he says “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move.”(135) He then goes on to say, “Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.”(135) The museum is definitely one of the more powerful symbols used by Salinger. To Holden, the museum represents of version of life he can comprehend, it is frozen in time, always the same. It is a type of fantasy world that he has made for himself throughout the entire novel, never growing older and maintaining his innocence. It bothers him immensely that each time he returns, everything remains untouched except himself. The exhibits represent the simple and idealistic way of life that Holden wishes he could live. When he finally reaches the museum, “…a funny thing happened. When I got to the museum, all of a sudden I wouldn’t have gone inside for a million bucks.”(136) He ultimately decides not to go in the museum, because after thinking about what it really means to him on the walk there, he realizes going in would mean shattering his fantasy world, and force him to face his changed self and the real adult world. Holden wants life to remain frozen in time like the museum, and can’t bring himself to go in and disturb his precious childhood fantasy.
Salinger shows Holden trying to be a protector of innocence through the use of symbolism to convey that Holden is trying to remain in childhood and save others from falling into adulthood. Close to the end of the novel, Holden visits his parents apartment in the middle of the night where he finds Phoebe home alone, asleep. He wakes her, and Phoebe asks Holden what he wants to do with his life. He replies with what might be Salinger’s greatest symbol of the whole novel. He says, “…I’m 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 they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”(191) This image he responds with reveals his fantasy of idealistic childhood and of his role as the protector of innocence. Holden lives in his own world with his own views of other people throughout the entire novel. Holden can’t deal with the complexities of real life and the adult world, so he chooses to oversimplify people, and sees all children as simple and innocent and all adults as “phony” and superficial. His catcher in the rye fantasy expresses his inability to see any bad in children, and how there is only two sides to life, and he is saving the children from aging into the bad side and turning into terrible adults. It also reflects his extremely naive view of the world, and disconnection from reality. Holden believes becoming an adult is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a person, and wants to protect himself and others from the adult world.
Holden doesn’t want to deal with himself changing, and the responsibilities and complexity of maturity that comes with change. The museum and the fact that he doesn’t go in demonstrates his inability to face himself changing. His view of himself as a “catcher in the rye” shows that he wants to remain childlike forever, and allow others to stay the same way . Holden spends the entire novel avoiding the inevitable, and can’t accept maturity and the loss of childhood innocence that comes with that maturity.