Innocence is the lack of obligation and knowledge. It’s where a person doesn’t know what it’s like to live with burdens. Getting a job, getting a car, and dealing with your own money are all events in life where people lose innocence. I would say Holden has an odd case of innocence. He has lost some yet still has some innocence about certain things. For instance, he is always obsessed about drinking alcohol. It almost seems like he wishes he was older so he could legally drink it yet this goes against his obsession with innocence. On the other end of the spectrum his encounter with Sunny showed that he still had innocence about the opposite sex. It is clear that people lose innocence with experiences in life. While Holden seems to want to keep his innocence it also seems like he’s trying to rid of it. When he paid for the prostitute to come to his room it seemed like he made the attempt to rid of some of his innocence but couldn’t live up to the task. Overall I think Holden is on both sides of the fence. He doesn’t really know what he wants with his life at this point but it seems that he is leaning on the innocent side.
While I do like your comparison of his wanting to retain his innocence with his need to drink, I disagree that he is trying to get rid of it. I don’t think that it’s really he’s trying to be more grown up but instead he believes he is at or above the level of most adults and thus shouldn’t be restrained to the restrictions of a child. He looks down on most people whether it is a person he has just met or someone that he has known for years. Such as Ackly from an outside perspective you would consider Holden and Ackly friends but if you really knew them then you would begin to see Holden’s dislike of Ackly. Even though he is years older than him he always calls him kid as if to prove he’s not above him in any way. So I don’t think it’s a matter of him wanting innocence but at the same time rejecting it, but instead Holden is trying to fuse the two together in a way that he thinks makes him better than most people.
ReplyDelete