Chicken Soup Symbol Analysis

In Franny and Zooey, chicken soup represents the everyday familial love that people desperately need but often take for granted. After college student Franny Glass has a minor nervous breakdown and returns to her family’s small Manhattan apartment to recuperate, Franny’s mother, Mrs. Glass, complains to Franny’s brother Zooey that Franny won’t eat any of the chicken soup that Mrs. Glass has made for her. Subsequently in the narrative, Zooey mocks Mrs. Glass’s obsessive focus on getting Franny to adopt a healthy diet during a bout of existential despair, while Franny herself tells Mrs. Glass that even the mention of chicken soup makes her feel sick. Thus, it seems that the soup represents Mrs. Glass’s narrow-minded focus on material things in contrast with her children’s intellectual and spiritual interests. However, near the narrative’s end, when Zooey is critiquing the way Franny has pursued mystical enlightenment, he asks her how she could possibly recognize a legitimate spiritual teacher when she can’t even recognize and accept “a consecrated cup of chicken soup.” The word “consecrated” means “made sacred”; thus, Zooey is implying that Mrs. Glass’s motherly love for Franny has made the chicken soup that she offers Franny holy and sacred. This, in turn, suggests that Franny has been looking for spiritual enlightenment in the wrong places. Rather than searching for it in esoteric books, she should have realized that the enlightenment she needs can be found in the love the members of her family have for each other—a simple and nourishing kind of love symbolized by chicken soup.