Isolation and Innocence in Catcher in the Rye

In The Catcher in the Rye, teenager Holden Caulfield describes, in a frame narrative, his descent into depression and his experiences before his breakdown. Throughout the novel, Holden is always about to do something, while never really doing it. He desperately needs companionship, but he always rejects it at the last second. This cycle shows Holden’s self—imposed isolation and rejection of personal contact. He always contemplates running away to be a hermit. whether out west or up north to the log cabin, but all ofthese attempts are efforts to maintain his naive View of the world.

JD. Salinger employs Holden’s isolation and alienation in order to reveal his attempt at idealizing innocence in his world. A crucial moment in the book comes when Holden mishears the Robert Burn’s poem, “Coming Through the Rye“ He tells Phoebe that he wants to be the titular ‘catcher in the rye’, saving children from falling off the cliff to some great evil lurking below.

But the rye field serves as a grand metaphor for Holden’s crusade to stop children‘s loss of innocence as theyjoin (or fall down into) the adult world. Only Holden can see over the rye field, as he is suspended between the two worlds. The children stumble along blindly, unable to see over the top, just as children are often lost in their wander through the odyssey of childhood discovery. The field. symbolizing childhood, is what Holden clings to, unwilling to descend into what he considers the depraved world of adult sexuality and obscenity.

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Throughout much of the story, Holden avoids interacting with his peers as well as superiors by casting up a facade of isolation; he dismisses them all as “phony” and therefore undeserving of his attention. Instead, he dreams of idealized figures from his childhood, telling the reader about what he considers the perfect, blameless girl, Jane Gallagher, and the epitome of innocence, his younger sister, Phoebe.

Yet, he is afraid to call Jane, lest this new encounter ruin his idealized image of her. His self-imposed isolation is caused by these unrealistic idealsi Holden sees children as uncorrupted and guileless (literally unadulterated), while the grownup world is degenerate and perverted. When he is visiting Phoebe’s school to give the secretary a note for her, he notices that someone has written “Feck You” on the wall. Afraid that one ofthe children will see it and be told what it means, he hastily rubs it off, and imagines a “perverty” bum sneaking in at night to write it. Holden here reveals his na’ive outlook of the world, more specifically the realm of youth. He never considers that it was a schoolchild that vandalized the wall; he is not ready to accept that an elementaryeschooler would have that much evil in them. just as he misinterpreted the Robert Burns song, which is actually about a casual sexual encounter rather than an idealistic field of fun and games, he assumes that an adult graffitied the wall. He tries to find innocence in things that are not, and in the process shows the reader how disconnected he is from the real world.

By putting up barriers and blanket statements, such as the adult world is dirty and depraved, or that people are phony, he is able to justify his loneliness, and alienation from his fall into adulthood. He never sees children as phony, only adults, and although Mr. Antolini warns him of an terrible “fall” if he does not realize the superficiality of his behavior, he nonetheless alienates himself to try to insulated from the necessary process of introspection he must face at the California clinic. Throughout the novel, Holden exists in a state ofselfrimposed isolation. He goes on a date with Sally to try for companionship, but soon rejects her out of annoyance, a shallow excuse.

Holden also sees Phoebe as the manifestation of idealized childhood. When he reads her notebook, full of innocent annotations, he thinks of her as perfect and incorruptible, But through her determination to go with him out west, the reader realizes that the realm of youth is in fact much different from Holden’s fantasies. However, he refuses to acknowledge this, and wraps himself in his armor (isolation). In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden is slowly betrayed by the world he idealizes, Even as he searches for a way to escape his cocoon of alienation, the world unwraps itself before his eyes. Although we are not privy to his realization ofthis fact, the implication is that he must understand this in order to exist in the real world.