Jankowski 1

Hayley Jankowski

AP Literature and Composition

Mrs. Hudak

23 October 2020

Prompt #2

In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger utilizes Holden’s longing for places, people, and

things to develop a major theme within the novel. The novel itself is told in the past tense, for

Holden is recounting all the events that happened a year ago. The story as a whole serves as a

way to represent the connections between Holden’s present self and his past. Throughout the

novel, the protagonist struggles to maintain not only his own innocence but the innocence of

those around him. In childhood, kids are often immune to the everchanging and cruel nature of

the world. The innocence of the past becomes Holden’s source of happiness and comfort within

the novel. For instance, the mention of places and people from Holden’s past reveals his longing

for the world and himself to stay the way they were.

Despite growing older, Holden still cherishes the places from his childhood. Throughout

his youth Holden often visited the Museum of Natural History, which freezes time in its displays

of historic events, people, and animals. Holden reveals that the “best thing, though, in that

museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move” (121). Since the

time the young man visited that museum as a kid, the museum has not changed. Holden’s urge to

revisit the museum during his journey shows that he wishes to go back to that time. On the other

hand, he cannot bring himself to enter the museum, for he comes to the realization that he

himself has grown too old for that place. In the past few years, Holden has witnessed death and
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undergone trauma, and even though he desires to go back to the museum, he cannot because the

happiness that came with the visit will not fill his heart like it did before.

The main character loses some of his innocence when he experiences the death of his

younger brother Allie. Allie died at the age of ten three years prior to the novel’s setting, and he

will forever remain that age. In contrast, Holden continues to grow up, reluctantly, in a world

without his brother. The past, in Holden’s mind, is an idealistic world in which Allie still lives

with him. However, the past is behind Holden, so he attempts to hold onto part of it through “Old

Allie’s baseball mitt. I happened to have it with me, in my suitcase” (39). In keeping Allie’s mitt

with him, Holden is trying to keep Allie, the embodiment of childlike innocence, alive. Another

character Holden tries to preserve is his friend Jane Gallagher. The pair are childhood friends,

and Holden has not spoken to her in awhile even though he gets multiple chances to. He asks

Stradlater if “she still keeps all her kings in the back row?” (42). A young female figure often

represents innocence and purity, but Jane is growing up just like Holden. He wishes she remains

the way he remembers her, and by avoiding an encounter with her, Holden maintains the idea

that she is still innocent.

The notion that the past can preserve innocence leads Holden to feel a longing towards it

and helps to develop the theme of the loss of innocence. Even though the narrator seems to have

a disliking towards most things, he truly yearns for the past. At the end of the novel, Holden

confesses, “I sort of miss everybody I told about” (214). This contrasts Holden’s persistent

expression of dislike towards many characters in the novel. In Holden’s efforts to preserve the

innocence of the world around him, he comes to the realization that he cannot save everyone.

Therefore, the reader can conclude Holden has changed throughout the story, but his final

statement shows he still craves the joy brought by past events