| The research , as its title indicates , deals with two literary works that share the same idea which is going back in continuous pursuit of childhood innocence . Though these two works are in common , their authors approach this very idea differently . Franz Kafka , a European novelist , deals with this subject from a psychological as well as a naturalistic point of view , showing how living in a modern merciless mechanical world makes man lose his human worth _ a situation that makes him , as Gregor Samsa in Kafka's novella , Metamorphosis ( 1912 ) , who returns symbolically to a more infantile and primitive state in the form of a cockroach , dreams of going back to the stage of childhood where he can be far away from the burden of responsibility , the kind of responsibility that a person is going to afford when moving to the adolescent stage . Jerome D. Salinger , an American writer in the 1930s , approaches it from a psychological point of view , showing how difficult it is for Holden Caulfield , the hero of his novel |