The impact characters in the book had on Holden

Throughout the novel, Holden meets several people that are significant to the plot and within this essay we will examine three of them. We will look at the person we believe had the most significant impact on Holden and therefore also the novel, Phoebe, the prostitute who exposed his reluctance to give up his innocence, Sunny as well as the young child that sang Comin Thro’ The Rye.
Holden’s sister, Phoebe Caulfield, is in the 4th grade and is therefore 10 years old. Holden loves her and doesn’t want to lead her in this same life as he has. In one way it is also apparent that Phoebe is more mature than Holden even though she is far younger. She notes that he barely likes anything that he sees. She sees that the things he likes are things frozen in time, people he hasn’t seen lose their innocence. For example his younger brother Allie who died of leukaemia at a young age and Jane, a girl he used to date and still thinks about. She is also the one who in the end makes him realize that he has to let some of his innocence go. “All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddam horse, but I didn’t say or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab to the gold ring you have to let them do it and not say anything. If the fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.” Here it shows some growth of his character, he used to want to save all the children from adulthood and such but we believe this quotation shows that he too realized that growth is necessary.
However not all of the characters in the book were as benevolent as Phoebe. The prostitute he bought some time with was not. The way we see it she just exposed Holden’s confusion about sex to himself as well which is apparent in his thoughts just after she took her dress “I certainly felt peculiar when she did that. I mean she did it so sudden and all. I know you’re supposed to feel pretty sexy when somebody gets up and pulls their dress over their head, but I didn’t. Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy.”. As she started doing some more direct advances on him he began to make up crazy lies about why he couldn’t do it. We see it as quite likely that the lies were as much for him as for her. He didn’t want to admit to himself that he couldn’t give up that part of him and so he hid himself behind the curtain of lies he often uses throughout the book.
In contrast of the feelings Sunny induced in Holden, he saw a young child walking down the street with his parents, singing. That image was one of the first things in the novel that truly appealed to Holden. He could relate to the child as being one of the people he wanted to save from the cruelty of adulthood. We argue that the child is important to the novel as it shows the “old” Holden’s way of thinking nicely. The innocence and even ignorance of the child walking in the street appealed to him and probably also inspired him to be the catcher in the rye.
For those reason we feel that the singing child represents the “old” Holden in the same way we feel that Phoebe represents the new one. Sunny helped Holden in a way as she made his confusion apparent to him as well and therefore started his transition towards the Holden we see in the end of the book. A more mature Holden that has started accepting the fact that you can not stay innocent forever, you have to grow up sometime.

//Pontus & Kosma