In the novel, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield starts off as a very complex character who is very anti-social and has not experienced the real world, however throughout the story within three days he encountered many different things which help him lose his childhood innocence and successfully transition to real-world maturity. Holden does things out of his comfort zone and takes risks which is normal for someone who is his age to mature as he grows older. Because Holden becomes more involved with his sex life, communicates more with others, and shows signs that he wants to go back to school he, Holden is successfully making a transition from his innocent self to real world adult maturity. As a sign of growing up, Holden begins to do more adult-like things like having sexual thoughts and actually having sex instead of being sexually insecure as he was in the past. While Holden is on a train, his friends mother sits next to him and as they are talking he says to himself, “She had quite a lot of sex appeal, too, if you really want to know” (63). He becomes sexually attracted to her which is a little weird because he says that she is forty-four or forty-five and he is only sixteen, but he is showing signs that he is beginning to grow up. Also in a different scenario he is speaking to himself as he just finished watching a man and a women squirt water at each other and says “For instance, that girl that was getting water squirted all over her face, she was