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Holden Caulfield Innocence

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Innocence may be preserved in a child indefinitely. However, influences from both family and society impose standards of maturity on children which gradually strip the youthfulness away from a child. Additionally, children may isolate themselves or face ostracization, which leads to the degradation of a child’s purity as he begins creating his own unique worldview apart of his community. Parents are the closest influence on a developing child. Therefore, their mature actions are bound to accumulate over the child, instigating his growth from childhood innocence. This is especially true when parents perform their intense habits in front of their kids. This is outlined by Theodore Roethke who recalls his father through a poem. He states how …show more content…

This leads to a loss of innocence as the child begins maturing individually and creating their own unique worldview. J.D. Salinger Highlights this in Catcher in the Rye through Holden Caulfield, and then reveals the huge remorse which this character faces for isolating himself. Near the end of the novel Salinger reveals that Holden “sort of [misses] everybody [he] told about…” (Salinger) his life and with whom he interacted. This demonstrates that Holden did have some meaningful connections in his life at one time, but eventually lost them because of his isolation, which caused a large amount of regret and loss of his innocence. This is most evident as Holden states that he even “missed that… Maurice...” who was a pimp that solicited Holden earlier in the book. That scene, in which Holden hired a prostitute, was the penultimate indicator that Holden was isolating himself. Even though he is a teenager, Holden traveled to a city alone to perform mature tasks in order to prove that maturity to himself. These grown up activities ultimately lead to Holden’s dissatisfaction with adulthood. By the end of this novel, Holden is stuck reminiscing about his past and yearning to go back his childhood. Because of his isolation and desire to be mature, Holden essentially lost all of his innocence and fully transformed from a child to an adult. Similarly many children lose their innocence as a result of their own changing views of the world. Seamus Heaney outlines this in “Blackberry Picking” where he states that, “each year [he] hoped [his blackberries would] keep” but “ knew they would not.” (Heaney) This is an important reminder that time is the ultimate thief of childhood. Despite a lack of outside influences, Heaney compares his childhood to blackberries to convey that eventually, both would rot. In time, he knew that nothing completely pure in his

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