Childhood and Loss of Innocence in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

The literary representation of adolescent consciousness as a space of disillusionment with adult society is a persistent feature of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction across cultures, and a comparison of Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye reveals how different social environments shape the experience of growing up and the loss of childhood's protective naivety. This study examined how Enitan Taiwo in Atta's Lagos-set narrative and Holden Caulfield in Salinger's New York bildungsroman both experience alienation from the adult world as a form of moral clarity rather than mere immaturity. A developmental literary theory methodology combined with feminist and postcolonial critical perspectives was applied. The analysis focused on how each protagonist uses ironic distance from adult social performance as a means of preserving ethical integrity. Atta's Enitan navigates postcolonial Lagos's patriarchal domesticity and military rule, while Holden navigates 1950s American prep school culture and parental expectation. Both narratives use a confessional first-person voice that constructs the narrator as simultaneously vulnerable and perceptive. Results showed that while Holden's alienation is primarily psychological and rooted in grief, Enitan's is explicitly political and gendered, reflecting the specific oppressions of Nigerian womanhood. The study recommends this comparative pairing for undergraduate gender and literature courses at universities in the South West geopolitical zone of Nigeria.

Keywords: adolescence, loss of innocence, Sefi Atta, Salinger, bildungsroman