Holden Caulfield: Learning to Swim

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J.D. Salinger utilizes Holden Caulfield’s longing for childhood innocence and reminiscence of Allie’s life and death in The Catcher in the Rye in order to convey that one cannot begin to more forward in his/her life until the past is accepted. Before Allie’s passing, Holden was just like any other child: carefree and content. Allie’s death was a traumatic experience for Holden, seeing as he was only thirteen years old when leukemia triumphed over Allie, which influenced Holden’s ability to grow out of his immature state. The night that Allie died, Holden “broke all the windows in the garage”, symbolizing the turning point in Holden’s life, the point where innocence is no more (Salinger 38). Holden saw Allie as innocence itself, and when he was gone, so was his own childhood purity, trapping him in the shallow end of the pool. Although Holden narrates the story when he is seventeen years old, he still lives in a child’s mind because he was deprived of a proper childhood due to his brother’s death. He categorizes every adult, every person with authority or maturity, as a phony. Holden describes his budding classmates at Pencey Prep as phonies, using them as an excuse to fail out of school once again (Salinger 13). Holden’s inability to recognize the difference between being a professional and personable adult and being a lousy person reveals his failure to move on from the past and make a move toward the future. Holden’s loss of childhood innocence hinders his ability to not only move on himself, but to ensure that others cannot fall into the pretentious adult world as well; he makes this his life goal. In an effort to coax Holden out of the past and into the future, his younger sister Phoebe asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. Instead of the usual responses (i.e. teacher, lawyer, engineer, etc.), Holden replies, “ What I have to do, I have to catch

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