The Importance Of Society In The Catcher In The Rye

Register to read the introduction… “He hates lies, phoniness, pretense, yet these are often his own sins;” though he tries to avoid the adult phoniness that he despises so much, he himself reflects the very actions and thoughts that he finds to be phony (Seng 1). He becomes furious at Stradlater for having sexual relationships with all of the girls that he has interest in. Taking sex not as a bond between two lovers but just viewing girls as sex objects and thus exploiting them of their childhood innocence is what makes Caulfield so angry even going so far as to punching Stradlater and getting into a fight with him. Meanwhile, when Caulfield goes to New York, the first thing he does is try to get in touch with a prostitute. Also, he hates to say things when he doesn’t mean it, such as “saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody [he’s] not at all glad [he] met” (Salinger 87). Yet, when he meets a Navy soldier for the first time, he tells him that he’s glad to have met him. He says one thing, but does another when throughout the whole novel he expresses his distaste for phoniness, proving the inevitable loss of childhood purity. In addition, when he “buy[s] drinks for the girls from Seattle he puts on a pretense of New York-ish world-weary sophistication. On the other hand he cannot bear that sort of pretense in others, and has only contempt for the kind of people who say that …show more content…
Throughout the course of the novel, Caulfield has trouble grasping this concept, for his wish is to “catch [the children] if they start to go over the cliff…. If they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going [he’d] have to come out from somewhere and catch them” (Salinger 173). Caulfield’s dream is to become a catcher in the rye where he would watch all of the children play, and if they fall, he catches them, symbolically representing him preventing children from falling into the abyss of the adult world. He has such a dream for he himself is trying to avoid adulthood, and he wants to preserve childhood innocence not only in himself but in all children, demonstrating the fact that the world would be a better place if such an event occurred because everyone would be pure, innocent, and honest rather than deceitful and morally rotten. He wishes that children could stay the way they are just as how in a museum, nothing every changes – their positions, poses, expressions, etc. always remain the same. However, society is too complex for it to become an innocent utopia. Caulfield finally starts to realize this fact when he visits the Museum of Art and sees the words “Fuck you” written into the wall. He quickly rubs it off of the wall, but then he sees the same phrase engraved into the wall into the knife; he realizes that no matter