Another big theme of the novel is Innocence of children. Holden believes that the children are almost perfect in the way that they are truthful, innocent and not phony. They never pretend or try to impress others. Holden has strong feelings of love towards children as evidenced through his caring for Phoebe, his little sister. He is protective of her and all the other children’s innocence. He tries to erase bad words from the walls in Phoebe’s elementary school and in the Egyptian Tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in order to not let them learn from the graffiti and wonder what it means. His desire towards preventing children’s innocence can be inferred when Phoebe ask him about what he wants to be. He thinks for a moment and replies that at some time in the future, he wants to be the only adult with all the little kids playing some games in the big field of rye and he will stand on the edge of a cliff and catch anyone who is going to fall off the edge of the cliff. He desires to be the catcher in the rye because he wants to save all the little children from the phony behavior of the adults in the world. He wants to prevent the children from making the mistake of becoming phony. He got this image from his mishearing of singing by the boy. It is a line from the Robert Burns poem, "if a body catch a body comin' through the rye." Holden tries to save the purity and innocence of the children around him but after he sees the graffiti and can not erase it he starts to realize that he is powerless to save children’s innocence in this world. He also begins to comprehend that all the kids have to fall into adulthood just like he has and his dream of shielding the children from maturity gradually disappears. He also says, “you have to let them do it...if they fall off they fall off.”(211) Although few kids do reach the ring without falling, Holden finally accepts that the majority of the children will fall off the carousel into the phony crowd. Holden finally believes that all children will eventually lose their purity and virtue.
Holden’s happiness is taken away through a bitter sequence of events. The novel opens up with Holden depresses after flunking out of Pencey, then tells about his brother Allie’s baseball mitt, and the suicide of his classmate, James Castle, from Elkton Hills. His brother Allie is already dead and he takes his baseball mitt with poems written on it to wherever he goes. So he can look at it whenever he misses him. He feels more depressed when he is in the room with Phoebe because he can't name anything he likes when Phoebe asks him what he likes. The only three things he can name that he likes are Allie, James Castle, and sitting in the room with Phoebe. Unfortunately two of the people that he names are already dead. It makes him even more depressed and lonesome. Whenever he passes the central park he always asks about the ducks in the pool and he is always trying to contact with someone by calling them. This illustrates how he feels lonely and wants someone to accompany him. And also throughout the novel, Holden seems to be excluded from and offended by the world around him. As he says to Mr. Spencer, he feels trapped on "the other side" of life, and he continually attempts to find his way in a world in which he feels he doesn't belong. You can see that Holden's isolation causes most of his pain. He never shows his own emotions directly, and doesn’t try to solve his problems. He needs contact and love, but his thought that most of the people in the world are phony that prevents him from looking for communication with others. He wants the meaningful connection like he once has with Jane Gallagher. But he isolates himself from society and these cause him loneliness and depression.
So in this novel, the teenage boy, Holden Caulfield, views the world as an evil and corrupt place which is full with phony people. He wants to prevent children from getting to adulthood and doesn’t want children to lose their innocence. Through out this whole novel Holden expresses his loneliness and depressions in many ways.
