He wishes to stop that passage of time and freeze everyone at a more innocent point in their lives. Everything Holden has observed in his life has told him that his brother Allie and his sister Phoebe are perfect in their childhood innocence, but will become like all of HoldenвЂ™s despised schoolmates, teachers, and other adults in due time. Though Allie is dead, but, he can still place the nobility and effect on Holden. Antolini gave Holden, the description of the mature man fits Allie. Holden sees maturity as inherently bad-growing up leads to corruption and phoniness, and finally death. Salinger Allie Caulfield Could Allie be a 'mature' man Based on the letter Mr. This quote not only gives the novel its title, it explains HoldenвЂ™s fundamental issue in a beautiful, poetic way. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff-I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around-nobody big, I mean-except me. In that way, Allie is the one acting like the catcher in the rye: because heвЂ™s eternally dead and eternally innocent, heвЂ™s somehow keeping Holden from going over his own clifffrom going down, down, down. вЂњAnyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Here, Allie is almost like a guardian angel for Holden, keeping him connected to the world.

Allie the catcher in the rye