Ideas and Themes in The Catcher in the Rye

            Analyse how the writer develops a significant idea or theme in The Catcher in the Rye.
             In the novel Catcher in the Rye, by J.D Salinger is about a 17 year old boy called Holden Caulfield, and his development into adulthood. This novel was unique to the time is was written, 1951, due to the fact that books almost never had a teenager boy as the protagonist, and his views upon the world, the book is narrated in a broken up and cynical voice and Holden finds many phoney things about the adult world that he tries to protect himself against. Firstly, there is the issue of Holdens childhood, his identity and the symbol of the red hunting cap.
             An important theme in The Catcher in the Rye, would be Holdens childhood and Salinger had shown that Holden had seen his childhood as a period of innocence and purity, and that the road to adult hood is terrifying to him. His state of mind is like a childs, because he tries to act like an adult but fails almost immediately, "Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it though, the same week I made it- the same night, as a matter of fact." This shows that Holden cannot keep the rules that he sets up for himself, and that he relies on other people to make the rules for him. Throughout the novel, Holden constantly talks about his two siblings with an overly positive attitude, which contrasts with a lot of the people he meets because they think that they are phonies, and this attitude is what is the most obvious sign that he is very attracted to the theme of childhood. An example of how Holden exaggerates their intelligence is during near the start of the novel when Holden is writing an essay for Stradlater; Holden talks about how amazing his older brother Allie, He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He never got mad at anybody.