How Does Huck Finn Change Throughout The Catcher In The Rye

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Is the popular cliché “seasons change, but people don’t,” accurate? Most authors would disagree. Throughout written history, one of the most used storylines is of a protagonist changing themselves for the better in some way. One of the popular coined terms, ‘character development’, expressing the way that characters’ personalities shift and morph throughout a story, is proof of that.
Although it is the third-most banned book in the United States, Huckleberry Finn gives an admirable message to all readers: One can change who they are based on one’s own philosophies and ideas, just like Huck Finn throughout the novel. At the beginning of the book, Huck assimilates to the ideas of those around him (like Tom Sawyer’s cruelty against Jim and other …show more content…
In the novel, one of the main carrying themes throughout is that Holden resents change and is terrified of the inevitable coming-of-age that he is doomed to. He purposely flunks out of every high school that he attended because he does not want to graduate and grow up, and he runs away from confrontational situations. He, unlike the protagonists from Huckleberry Finn and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is not willing to change without a fight. It may be because of his era or his situation. Huck Finn is fine with changing because he does not want to be like the many negative parental/guiding figures in his life (ie. the Widow, his father, the Duke and the King), he wants to be different from them and discover the way that he intends to live his life; he is determined to find his own path, changing his values from the ones being inflicted upon him from the very start. Angelou is eager to change herself in her own book. Because of the childhood she had been born into, and because of the rape that changed the way that she functioned and thought, she is curious about sex and sexuality, as well as other promicuious things. Her curiousity eventually causes a fiasco, but she sought this particular fiasco out. Holden is the opposite; he is afraid of any type of change in his life, and imagines a life saving children from the ultimate fate of growing older. Although Holden tries to deny the fact that he, too, is phoney and is not the same person he has always been, he is the same as everyone else around him. In the end, Catcher in the Rye enforces the message that people are multidimensional, their personalities shifting and changing
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