Catcher in the Rye Innocence

Some people are isolated from society because they cannot understand others. The Catcher in the Rye is the story of Holden Caulfield, who is alienated from the rest of the world and has not yet fully grown up. This story by J.D. Salinger is a bildungsroman novel because it is about the development of this teenage protagonist. Holden gets kicked out of another high school, Pencey Prep, and travels around New York City for a few days. Everywhere he goes, he sees phoniness in many different forms. Holden embodies the limbo between childhood and adulthood because he wants to preserve his own innocence and the innocence of other children. Examples of events that demonstrate this include: he likes the museum because everythings stays the same inside it, he states that his dream job is to be the catcher in the rye, and he rubs off the words “F*** you”, which are written on the walls of the school.
Holden loves going to the museum because everything stays the same except the people who go inside it. Holden talks about how he went to the museum many times with his old school, and he loves the fact that nothing changes. He says, “Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone”(158). This quote represents Holden’s fear and hatred of change. He wants everything around him to stay the same because he cannot understand change. Holden wishes he could live a life like this, where everything would remain unchanged forever. This way, the innocence of children could be kept.
Holden’s dream job is to be the catcher in the rye. He explains that he would be in a big field of rye with thousands of children, and he would stand at the edge of a cliff to catch any children who were going over it. This is an ideal job for him because he cannot stand adults, and this job would not require him to work with them. He tells Phoebe, "That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and...