What Does The Museum Symbolize Catcher In The Rye

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In The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger uses the museum and Jane in order to symbolize Holden’s desire to freeze time.
The Museum of Natural History highlights Holden’s recognition that there is no end to it to change. Holden’s desire to freeze time stems from his seeing everyone and everything constant changes. Holden hangs on to his childhood memories of Jane. He says she always kept “her kings in the back row” (Salinger 36). The way that Holden remembers Jane is of pureness, and of innocence. A memory that he is too afraid to loose, if she has changed at all. The way Holden remembers Jane, is just like his feelings for the museum. His memory of Jane is from the past, just like everything in the museum. “The best thing, though, in that museum

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that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. His created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself…

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