Just like the five decades of teenagers before me, I loved J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in high school. I loved narrator Holden Caulfield’s stream of consciousness, because that was how I thought and wrote as a teenager too. I found myself emulating his voice more, calling people “old,” like old Phoebe and obsessing over who was a phony and who was not. Something about the book captured my imagination.

Much later, when I returned to it as an adult, I didn’t find Holden quite as charming or the story as exciting as I had when I was a teenager. Instead, I was struck by how familiar Holden’s moral character was to me. It was like looking at my younger self.

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The Catcher in the Rye is about a teenage boy’s two-day adventure in New York City. It’s a coming-of-age story, compacted in 48 hours. Mostly, Holden is obsessed with sex, as you’d expect from a 17-year-old boy, but he has a kind of innocence—or maybe prudishness, righteousness—about it.

The whole reason Holden decides to start his adventure late on a Saturday night is because he’s bothered that his roommate, Stradlater, might have had sex with Holden’s childhood friend, Jane. Of all the talk his peers have about sex and who they get on with, Holden knew Stradlater was the only one who had actually had sex before.

He tells Stradlater about how when he and Jane were children, he would play Checkers with her on her front porch:

She wouldn’t move any of her kings. What she’d do, when she’d get a king, she wouldn’t move it. She’d just leave it in the back row. She’d get them all lined up in the back row. Then she’d never use them. She just liked the way they looked when they were all in the back row. (Chapter 4)

Holden becomes obsessed with this image and grows angry when he thinks about how Stradlater would never care about a thing like this: a girl keeping her kings in the back row because they looked nice. Holden gets in a bloody fight with his roommate, then leaves.

Similar innocence-seeking episodes emerge, like when Holden, in his New York hotel room, sees a couple spitting water on each other through the window across the way. He muses:

I think if you don’t really like a girl, you shouldn’t horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you’re supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It’s really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes. (Chapter 9)

Holden sees the men around him treating girls pretty horribly. And as much as he himself wants to have sex and treat girls crumby too (he admits), there’s a part of him that wants to cling to childhood images of playing Checkers on his friend’s porch.

Holden is situated in the in-between space of childhood and adulthood. Where he’s at in this story, in the two-day spans of time, he is captivated by innocence while trying to navigate an adult space. The people he is drawn to—the nuns at the diner, the little girl whose skates he tightens, the whistling boy on the street, the brothers at the museum, his kid sister Phoebe—are the innocent ones. He finds himself constantly bored, repulsed, or angry with the ones his age or older. Adults are constantly disappointing him, scolding him, or abusing him.

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Lately, Christian ethicists have begun challenging the idea that moral agency is a “zero-sum game,” that either you don’t have it (as a child) or have it (as an adult) (Ott, “Searching for an Ethic,” p. 162). Maybe, instead, agency is part of being made in the image of God; it’s just that a person’s level of personal autonomy and capacity to make rational choices changes and develops over time (163).

Holden is in an in-between space as a moral agent. There is no doubt he exerts agency and has a strong moral compass directing him, but he doesn’t always have the wisdom to know what to do. So what he does is continue to oscillate between adulthood and childhood.

He propositions a prostitute, and he wears his hunting hat backwards.

He smokes two packs of cigarettes, and he bursts into tears.

Holden admits very early in the book that he’s constantly being told to act his age (not 13, but 17). Sometimes, too, he acts old for his age, he says, but no one seems to comment on that.

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In probably the most well-known episode of the story, and the scene for which the book is named, Holden is having a conversation with his 10-year-old sister Phoebe. He asks if she knows the song that goes, “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye”? He’s actually misheard the words; it’s a body meets a body, corrects Phoebe. But this doesn’t stop Holden. He carries on:

Anyway, I keep picturing all  these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. 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. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy. (Chapter 22)

This aching Holden has to protect, to save innocence is profound. It’s something so familiar to me, too. As I’ve been shifting my research interests toward adolescent sexual ethics, I’ve spent some time thinking about my 14- to 17-year-old self and the in-betweenness I experienced, and my desire—like Holden—to cling to a sense of purity and to remain innocent/ignorant.

I remember, at 17, being so confused and angry when I learned that my friends—my church friends!—were having sex. It was around that time, too, when my best friend cussed in front of me the first time—and I cried.

Some of this is part of who I am, I know. I have always had a strong moral compass. But it’s also something that was encouraged in me in evangelical purity culture, where I cloistered myself those four years of my life.

In her article on teen sexting, Christian ethicist Karen Peterson-Iyer wonders if evangelical purity culture encourages girls to remain “moral children, in need of a father’s or a husband’s, sexual protection” rather than cultivating their moral agency (Peterson-Iyer, “Mobile Porn?” p. 156). In the in-betweenness of those teenage years, where my moral agency ought to have grown and developed, it was instead being suppressed, either intentionally or not. In some ways, I was being asked to remain a child, to not practice my sexual or moral agency but rely on my spiritual leaders to make decisions for me and about my body. Imagine the confusion I felt once I graduated youth group, left my Christian bubble behind, dated men, and began making decisions for myself.

As for Holden, there is a lot of speculation as to why he acts the way he does. The last chapter of the book reveals that Holden has been institutionalized, that his two-day adventure exposes his mental unraveling. The cause of this unraveling could be the trauma of his brother Allie’s death when he was 13. Maybe Holden could not grow out of that stage of life. Or maybe it’s all the sexual abuse Holden alludes to that keeps him demanding non-perverseness from those around him.

Or maybe his unraveling is on the spectrum of emotions that all teenagers feel: the angst of changing bodies and desires, of identity formation, of figuring out where you belong.

And maybe the adults in Holden’s life just didn’t get it.