Phoebe Caulfield

The argument

Holden Caulfield is concerned about his sister, Phoebe, remaining a kid. He wants to ensure she will not be exposed to the phoniness of the world. To Holden, Phoebe symbolises the innocence and goodness of childhood and does not want her to be corrupted as he had been. She functions in the novel less as a person he simply loves than as the thing he is trying to preserve — the standard against which he measures what he believes has already been lost in himself. When Holden is picking Phoebe up from school, he is appalled by the profanity written on the walls. He tries to rub the words off the wall but gives up after realizing he cannot clean all of them. The episode gives the theme its clearest shape. The corruption he wants to keep from her is not a single threat he can intercept but something written across the surfaces of the world she moves through, and his failure to erase it is the failure of the protective project itself. He can remove one instance of it and not the condition. Phoebe and Holden have a very close relationship. He feels the need to protect her since she is still a child. The closeness is what makes the protection feel urgent to him: because she is the person he is nearest to, hers is the childhood he can imagine guarding, and her state becomes the measure of whether the thing he values still exists anywhere. In Central Park, Holden becomes happy and relieved when he watches Phoebe ride the carousel since she is proving she is still a child. The relief is the point. He is not made happy by anything he has accomplished or resolved, but by evidence that the condition he wants to defend survives in her. That is why the novel's concern with innocence and childhood is expressed most directly through Phoebe rather than through anything Holden says about himself.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Despite Holden's attempts to protect Phoebe, she has already been exposed to the cruelness of the adult world. She has most likely seen the profanity written in her school since it is everywhere. Additionally, Phoebe is already familiar with death and is grieving Allie.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] What Phoebe represents to Holden is not what the novel is about. The premise reports the narrator's projection, and the book repeatedly shows that projection to be unreliable. [Rejecting P2] The same scenes cut the other way. Holden abandons the wall because the words cannot all be erased, and Phoebe — grieving Allie, and challenging her brother more directly than any adult in the book — is not the sealed innocent he needs her to be. A theme the novel undercuts is one it is examining rather than the one it is about.