Holden Admires Phoebe

587 Words3 Pages
Holden admires Phoebe because she is the true, pure representation of childhood; in essence, she has all the qualities in a person that he admires. He appreciates her credibility, and her desire to be different to the rest of the world. When Holden is reading her notebook, he states that he could read it all day and all night long. What makes this notebook so appealing is its lack of pretension and falsity; Phoebe simply wrote exactly what she was thinking, and this is one of the reasons why he loves her so much. He also admires how she is a pure soul, untainted by the rest of the adult world. She behaves in her own way, unique and not succumbed by peer pressure, or the expectations of others. In Holden's eyes, Phoebe is exactly the sort of child he wants to protect by being the catcher in the rye. Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself. As his thoughts about the Museum of Natural History demonstrate, Holden fears change and is overwhelmed by complexity. He wants everything to be easily understandable and eternally fixed, like the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the museum. Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. His created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a protective armor of cynicism. As its title indicates, the
Open Document