Mrs. Shamel
Composition II
26 April 2017
Innocence Lost “I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be” (93). On January 1, 1919, in New York, J.D. Salinger was born. He would grow to be a literary virtuoso, notwithstanding having few works and living a tranquil life. The Catcher in the Rye set a new path for writing in America after WWII and made Salinger well known. In The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, our protagonist, Holden, tells of his journey from Pencey Prep School in Pennsylvania to New York City from a mental hospital in California in the 1950s. The Catcher in the Rye is a powerful novel that uses adolescence and innocence to relate to the reader, …show more content…
Holden thinks of Jane as innocent, which makes her dating Stradlater wrong. When Stradlater asks Holden to write his essay, Holden writes about his dead brother, Allie’s, old baseball mitt. Allie's passing in adolescence absolutely makes it feel as though life's "rules" are brutal, and gives clarification to Holden's obsession with youth. Since the essay isn’t even relevant, Stradlater is furious, and won’t talk about the date. Holden attacks him and Stradlater punches him. Holden obviously detests the possibility that anything sexual may have occurred amongst Stradlater and Jane. His defeat here symbolizes the bigger battle he will lose against growing up. Holden's sadness about Jane possibly being sexual with Stradlater makes him want to leave Pencey, isolating himself in New York. He starts acting funny. He wears a red hunting hat, asks the cab drivers what ducks do in winter, and hits on girls he claims to hate. He’s acting childish, and doing things that are simply inappropriate. When Holden accepts the offer of the prostitute, he does so out of loneliness, and the craving to be more grown-up. Be that as it may, he isn't a grown-up, and is horrified of human touch, and he has second thoughts. Even though the