How Does Holden Lose Some Illusions In Catcher In The Rye

The Catcher in the Rye Essay “Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others”(Virginia Woolf). Childhood is a stage in life that impacts your future and who you become as an adult. In the book Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, the protagonist Holden Caulfield, went through tough childhood that later on in his adult life impacted him. During his childhood he lost someone important, Allie, Holden’s brother. Holden had two brothers Allie and D.B. as well as he had one sister, Phoebe. D.B. was a famous writer in hollywood yet, at first he was a normal writer, who didn’t wrote movie scripts or plays. Holden goes to Pencey college, where he gets an ax or in other words gets kicked out, for failing all of his classes except
In the book Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s dark childhood shapes the meaning of the book as a whole by the events in his childhood preventing him from growing and seeing change or becoming an adult as losing all your innocence, yet he sees he can’t stop this from happening, that you eventually have to become an adult and just carry on your
In the text it says how misinterprets a lyric of the poem “If a body meet a body, comin thro the rye” but he thinks it said “If a body catch a body comin’ thro the rye,” which makes him think of a field of rye perched high on a cliff, full of children romping and playing. He wants to protect the children from falling off the edge of the cliff by “catching” them if they were on the verge of tumbling over.He says that he want’s to be the catcher in the rye all day. In other terms Holden misinterpretation of the lyrics caused him to think that he wanted to save the children before they lost their innocence and become adults. He didn’t want change yet later on in the text we see how this idea changes. Phoebe made him realize that those were not the lyrics but also that change had to occur and that it wasn’t that hard being an adult in society. In chapter 25 Holden takes Phoebe to a carousel and he see’s her how she still enjoys riding the carousel no matter that she’s growing up. He says “ I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I Was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just