Every child is warned of the “adult world” where all the magic and fairytales of their previous years disappears, where enjoyment is succeeded by exhaustion and monotony, where you have to pay taxes! During their youth, a considerable portion is dedicated to fortifying their emotions for their upcoming toils. However, what happens when life shatters this fantasy too early? Holden Caulfield from Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Franny Glass from his short stories, Franny and Zooey are two incidents of when the adolescent illusion cracks. Both these characters suffer from the death of their beloved sibling. Holden is an abnormal, introverted teenager who isolates himself from the rest of the “phony” people in world. After running away from
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Holden expresses this detriment vividly with his strange affection for Allie’s baseball mitt, the red hunting hat and his desperation to combat the corruption of childhood innocence. To Holden, Allie was the epitome of childhood innocence and his image, the memory of his little brother “is preserved forever in death.” (Han) In order to remember and honor his little brother, Holden hopelessly attempts to sustain this purity during a time where society expects him to mature and consolidate his youthful emotions and mind. His baseball mitt acts as a similarly, however, is tangible. “I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt. I was a very descriptive subject” (Salinger, 38) Catcher presents the emotional connect of Holden and his brother’s mitt. Parallel to Allie’s innocence the glove is a frozen frame of his intelligence in which Holden carries in order to perpetuate his sibling’s image. The hunting hat serves as a connection to Allie’s red hair. For Franny, Seymour was the religious figurehead in her life and therefore just as Holden did with Allie’s innocence, Franny obsessed with Seymour’s religious diversity. She did this through reading The Way of the Pilgrim, a book owned by her brother and applied the information within the novel to her everyday life. From this, Seymour was preserved in Franny’s world.
Holden expresses this detriment vividly with his strange affection for Allie’s baseball mitt, the red hunting hat and his desperation to combat the corruption of childhood innocence. To Holden, Allie was the epitome of childhood innocence and his image, the memory of his little brother “is preserved forever in death.” (Han) In order to remember and honor his little brother, Holden hopelessly attempts to sustain this purity during a time where society expects him to mature and consolidate his youthful emotions and mind. His baseball mitt acts as a similarly, however, is tangible. “I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt. I was a very descriptive subject” (Salinger, 38) Catcher presents the emotional connect of Holden and his brother’s mitt. Parallel to Allie’s innocence the glove is a frozen frame of his intelligence in which Holden carries in order to perpetuate his sibling’s image. The hunting hat serves as a connection to Allie’s red hair. For Franny, Seymour was the religious figurehead in her life and therefore just as Holden did with Allie’s innocence, Franny obsessed with Seymour’s religious diversity. She did this through reading The Way of the Pilgrim, a book owned by her brother and applied the information within the novel to her everyday life. From this, Seymour was preserved in Franny’s world.