Compare and Contrast Paper

Young and Innocent Lives
As people slowly grow up and change in every way, they also lose their own innocence and they acknowledge and accept the loss of innocence of everyone else. The good people are isolated from society, because they are unwilling to change. Two novels that I have read share a similar theme, but in different ways. In each novel a character is going through hard times and is not able to make decisions. They need a close friend to help them, so they can move on. Although these novels are very different from each other and have very different plots and resolutions, they can be compared based on an important theme. In the novels The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, young and innocent lives are given up to society and are destructed.
In both novels The Cather in the Rye and in The Lord of the Flies, a major topic and synopsis is the preservation of childhood innocence and how it is being destroyed by society. In the novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, the protagonist Holden Caulfield is frustrated and feels that he is growing up too fast and is unable to find a way to stop it. Holden’s thought about stopping children from falling down the cliff shows that he wants to preserve the innocence of the children. He is frightened, because he is guilty of the sins he sees in others. Holden isn’t able to understand why people do bad things; “While I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written ‘Fuck You’ on the wall. It drove me near crazy” (201). Similarly, the loss of innocence is evident in most characters of The Lord of the Flies. One of the characters, Simon finds out who the real beast is. He wants to go tell the others because he wants everyone to be united together and be able to work things out properly. The boys are in the middle of a chant while Simon goes to tell them and they attach him with their bare hands, thinking him as the beast. The boys in this novel are unable to retain the much needed innocence to preserve peace amongst them. In both novels a character is harmed either physically or mentally for wanting to do what they think is right. Both novels share some similar themes and have similar views, but differences can be pointed out as well.
Although both novels have a similar theme, the characters think about their problems differently. In The Catcher in the Rye, when Holden is faced with society’s expectations to become an adult, he fights to hold on to his own innocence and encourages himself to keep preserving the innocence of the children around him. An example where this is seen is when Phoebe rides on the carrousel and keeps trying to reach for the gold ring. Holden seeing kids riding on horses and having fun makes him very happy; “I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth” (213). In

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