Catcher In The Rye Adult Analysis

The Catcher in the Rye is a novel about a child who does not want to enter adulthood. The theme of the story is Holden Caulfield’s painfulness of growing up and living a new life as an adult. Holden’s main goal is to avoid adulthood which he thinks that the only solution to avoid growing up is to act and think like a young child. His personal thoughts towards the Museum of Natural History addresses that he actually fears to become an adult. Furthermore, it demonstrates that Holden does not want to work through the process of becoming an adult because he realizes that the process of growing up is too complex and challenging for him to handle. Holden wants everything in his life to be understandable and easy so that he is available to solve problems
whenever a conflict happens. He describes an easy life towards the fact that he was able to fully understand about Indians and Eskimos in the museum of Natural History. Holden fears about the relationship with other people because he feels guilty due to the fact that he criticizes others and cannot understand everything. In order to show that Holden does not understand everything around him, the author provides an example when Holden shares his thoughts about sex and swears to god that he does not understand anything about sex. Instead of Holden accepting that entering adulthood scares him, he creates his personal fantasy that adulthood is a hypocrisy world, while the world of childhood deals with innocence. Holden’s image of the adulthood and childhood cannot reveal better than his personal fantasy about the catcher in the rye. Holden thinks a field of rye is place for children to play around which is equivalent to death before falling from the edge of a cliff. His fantasy makes him want to avoid adulthood stronger than ever. After Mr. Antolini shares his experience, Holden starts to realize that trying to avoid adulthood is impossible and that his choice was absolutely wrong.