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How Does Holden Lose His Innocence

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When we are young we are always amazed at all the things and privileges that adults get.They entice us into thinking that being an adult is better, and we naturally then want to grow up and stop being treated like a child. However, when we are young we do not see the price of becoming older; we do not understand that the privileges come with a cost, and that knowledge of the world can scare you and make you want to turn away. Once the innocence and naivety of your childhood is gone you wish to find it again. Holden Caulfield is in that gray area of wanting to be an adult and wanting to stay a child, he wants to protect the children from losing their innocence. Holden felt like he had to grow up and that he had lost his innocence and childhood when Allie passed.

Holden as a way of acknowledging his own problems wants to solve problems in others, he does this by wanting to save children’s innocence. One example of this in the book(should site where this was found) is when he is going to his sister Phoebe's school and sees …show more content…

An example of this in the book is when Holden is on the train going away from Pencey and he meets the mother of one of his old classmates and proceeds to lie about almost his entire life to her. This is a way for him to escape from his struggles for a while, he can be someone else. Holden also has a lot of outside pressures in his life to be more “adult” he is around Stradlater is one of the only sexually active “role models” he has in his life at the time.He feels the need to have sex, as if losing his virginity will somehow prove his manhood. However whenever Holden tries to lose his virginity he always stops at the last minute and brushes it off like “he wasn't in the mood” to do it, when in reality its Holdens conscious stopping him from in a sense losing that last bit of innocence he

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He tries to give himself up for this cause of saving children but he shows that he is not mature enough be able to make a meaningful impact in this perceived problem. It is clearly shown that Holden believes that there is a problem in society. He believes that children need to keep their innocence. He feels that loss of innocence negatively impacts people and feels that he has to save them. We can first see his personal issues about the lack of innocence when he discovers that Stradlater and Jane Gallagher had sex casually with no intention

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