Catcher In The Rye Adulthood Quotes

Life is seen in a peculiar way through the eyes of teenagers. Often, teens are scared to enter the adult world because it means facing greater challenges that they might not yet be prepared for.The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is a perfect example of a book that portrays the adult world through the eyes of a troubled but intelligent teenager. Holden Caulfield, the main character of the book has his own twisted views of the adult world and constantly criticizes it.

“And 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” (Salinger 93).

Phoebe asks Holden to name something he’d like to be, in which Holden responds that he would like to be the catcher in the rye, catching little kids as they start to go over a cliff. Holden wants to preserve a child’s innocence, falling off the cliff representing the loss of that innocence. He wants to stop time and doesn’t want to grow up himself. He avoids the responsibilities of adult life, failing his classes, wandering around New York instead of getting help. While Phoebe rides on the carrousel in the end of the book, Holden realizes he can’t continue dreaming that he could preserve everyone’s innocence. All the kids on the carrousel were grabbing for this gold ring, symbolizing growth. Holden says: “the thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them” (page 211). He acknowledges that he can’t stop a child’s mind from developing. They need to go through life on their own, with all the ups and downs a person faces in a lifetime. With the sudden downpour of rain, Holden feels the impact of all his problems and feels that he can finally resolve them. He says: “I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around” (page 213). Holden’s ambition to be the catcher in the rye is destroyed

After Phoebe asks what he wants to be when he grows up, Holden goes into detail and illustrates, “… 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”(Steinbeck 191). Holden values a child’s security in the highest regards and is willing to save one from hitting the bottom of a cliff. As the bottom of the cliff represents the unpleasant and demanding world of adulthood, Holden is finally separating himself from childhood and accepting that he is an adult. After Holden encourages Phoebe to enjoy the carousel, he observes, “All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddamn horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but its bad if you say anything to them…”(Steinbeck 232). Holden is overprotective over his younger sister Phoebe, except when she is on the carousel and he learns that she can develop her own independence. Noting that children also have risks and decisions they have to make themselves without adult interaction, like reaching for a gold ring but knowing the risk of falling. Holden can finally completely separate his adult self and his child self, and only look back with nostalgia. Earlier, Holden regards himself as “the catcher”, the savior who protects children from frightening reality of adulthood, but after seeing a lot of maturity in Phoebe he encourages her to reach for “the gold ring”, without any need for safety and

I was trying to find some kind of closure at Pencey. This school is not the first place I left before; I even left places I didn’t know I was leaving. Nothing feels worse than leaving a school or place without the proper closure. Whether it is on good or bad terms I want to know it will be the last time I’ll be there. I want to say goodbye to all the troubles and failures I found at Pencey before I can move on with my life.

“The Catcher in the Rye is a genuine initiation tale, even though it is only the candidate undergoing the ordeal who is conscious of what his final decision means; the real evidence of the decadence of his world is that the initiators who impose the ordeals upon him are too much wrapped up in themselves even to understand the meaning of their actions. (French)”. In the book, there are many people that have affected Holden’s life so deeply and they are unaware of this fact, like Allie. Allie is what makes Holden the way he is because of him Holden has taken a likeness to contain the innocence of children for them no to go out into reality because he doesn’t want to see children’s dreams to be shattered like

These instances made Holden have to grow up sooner than he should’ve. To start, when Phoebe, Holden’s little sister, asks what Holden enjoys and would want to do in his future Holden exclaims, “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” (Salinger 175). Holden explains the “catcher in the rye,” as catching children that are falling out of their childhood purity, proving his motive to protect children from what he believes is corruption. In addition, when Holden wants to deliver his goodbye note to Phoebe he spots a vulgar statement on her school wall and claims, “I’d smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddamn dead and bloody” (201). Without a doubt, Holden has a strong distaste about the children at the school reading it, proving his desire to protect the innocent. Lastly, as Holden waits to meet up with his old friend Sally his thoughts drift to an old museum that he used to go to as a kid, “The best thing, though, in that museum was that

One of the characteristics that reveals that Holden is a dynamic character is that he grew to understand adult world as the correct view. Holden's false view of the world consisted of him believeing that kids should not grow and stay kids forever because he does not want those beautiful and innocent beings to turn into phony and fake adults. Constatly, readers vitness Holden complaining about adults and referring to them as «phony». Holden,a lot of the time mentions adults actions to show how fake they are. «We always had the same meal on Saturday nights at Pencey. It was supposed to be a big deal, because they gave you steak. I'll bet a thousand bucks the reason they did that was because a lot of guys' parents came up to school on Sunday,

"This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom.” (187) Mr.Antolini’s discussion with Holden foreshadows the fall that Holden will encounter soon. Holden’s fall is long and feels like it is never-ending, he feels as if he will never hit the bottom. His innocence slowly disappears when he uses alcohol and tobacco to numb his pain. Kids that are still innocent don’t have pain, they don’t realize how bad the situations that they’re in actually are. Therefore Holden had lost his innocence long ago. Unfortunately he is unaware of that and believes that he still has some innocence left in him. Holden continued to try to numb his pain by thinking about people who make him happy. Allie made him happy, but now Allie is dead. Holden actually reaches out to Allie when he thinks he is falling off of the curb. "Every time I came to the end of a block, and stepped off the goddam curb, I had the feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street…'Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear.'" (198) Holden finally comes to realize that everyone has to grow up and grow out of their innocence. He no longer felt like he needed to protect the children or himself from losing their innocence because everyone grows up eventually. He finally decided that you have to let kids fall. Everyone falls and

In the novel, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden, the main character, is in a mental hospital where he is telling the story of how he got there. Holden starts his story around the time where he gets kicked out of his school, Pencey Prep. Holden, who has gotten kicked out of two schools including Pencey has to face his parents who do not know that he got kicked out of Pency yet. Up to now, Holden has had a rough life between his brother Allie dying of cancer and having to go to multiple different schools. On the other hand, Holden cares about very few things.

Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. His created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a protective armor of cynicism. But as the book progresses, Holden’s experiences, particularly his encounters with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the shallowness of his conceptions.

Most teens seem to believe that they are more prepared for drinking, drugs, and sex than they actually are. This mindset is no different for 16 year old Holden Caulfield in the book, The Catcher in the Rye. As the novel's main character, Holden attempts to participate in adult activities, although he is inexperienced, because his brother's death stole his childhood innocence. Holden felt as though he was responsible for protecting his sister and other young children by pushing himself to become an adult. Although Holden thought forcing himself to grow up would help himself and others, it only resulted in his mental relapse. Since Holden's failed attempts at adulthood resulted in his insanity, the challenges of change are consistently reiterated

Throughout the book The catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield takes a journey through his life. On the outside of this young teenage boy it may seem like he has it together, but the inside of him is a full-hearted child. Holden has troubles with his inability to not try and save every innocent life he passes all the while he’s trying to force childhood and his actions back on himself. The sudden death of his brother Allie makes him go through this transition where he needs to grow up and face reality, but he instead chooses to hide behind the thoughts of a child. Although some may think that Holden has grown up because of the change he shows from the beginning to the end of the novel and the fact that reality might have hit him, that is not the case.

In the controversial novel, The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield, the main protagonist, exhibits behavioral tendencies which are not common for most teenagers in his age. The author tries to present a mind of an emotionally damaged teenager who displays an extremely cynical and depressive personality. He finds everything and everybody to be phony or deceiving. “One of the biggest reasons [He] left Elkton hills was because [He] was surrounded by phonies” (Salinger 13). As can be seen from the quote, he is quite exaggerative.

1) The literary term being used is speaker where the main character, Holden, was speaking when it read "I said" to his little sister Phoebe.