All three of the main characters in The Catcher in the Rye, The Once and Future King, and Gulliver’s Travels all share the quality of wanting to preserve or valuing innocence. Holden Caulfield is just a normal teenage boy in the real world, while Arthur is a King, and Gulliver travels to many fantastical and eerie islands, but Holden still attempts to preserve innocence, even though he doesn’t have as much power in his society. Each of these characters show signs of wanting to value or preserve innocence: Holden obsessively attempts to remove a bad word from the wall in order for the children to not see it, and is very angered by the word (Salinger, 221), Gulliver is discontent when he returns to England and hates humans after living with
