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Education vs. Wisdom
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Franny and Zooey, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Franny and Zooey illustrates how grief often comes from deep love, but also how grief can end up preventing people from expressing love for each other. The Glass family has multiple reasons to grieve: Seymour Glass, the beloved eldest brother in the family, died by suicide about seven years before the narrative takes place, while another Glass brother, the happy-go-lucky Walt, died in an accident while serving in the U.S. army in the post-World War II American occupation of Japan. Precisely because they loved their brothers deeply, the other Glass siblings suffer grief and have difficulty showing love to their living siblings as a result. For example, while second-oldest brother Buddy deeply cares for his youngest siblings Zooey and Franny, he admits to avoiding them in the aftermath of Seymour’s suicide because he didn’t know what to say to them. Meanwhile, Zooey expresses his grief over Seymour in bitterness and rage at Buddy and at his mother, Mrs. Glass; at one point, he even snaps at Mrs. Glass that he doesn’t understand why Buddy doesn’t go ahead and die by suicide too, since he’s practically a ghost in the family already. Thus, the narrative illustrates the extreme difficulty of losing a loved one. More specifically, the way each member of the Glass family copes with Seymour’s death emphasizes the fact that even close, tight-knit families often struggle to support each other through the mourning process, since each person’s grief is unique and comes with its own complexities.
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Love and Grief ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Love and Grief appears in each part of Franny and Zooey. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Love and Grief Quotes in Franny and Zooey
Below you will find the important quotes in Franny and Zooey related to the theme of Love and Grief.
Zooey
Quotes
I know the difference between a mystical story and a love story. I say that my current offering isn’t a mystical story, or a religiously mystifying story, at all. I say it’s a compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated.
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I submit that Zooey’s face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is [...] But what was undiminishable, and, as already flatly suggested, a joy of a kind forever, was an authentic esprit superimposed over his entire face[.]
Have you ever seen a really beautiful production of, say, The Cherry Orchard? Don’t say you have. Nobody has. You may have seen “inspired” productions, “competent” productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov’s talent is matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul onstage.
Seymour once said to me—in a crosstown bus, of all places—that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.
As much as anything, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn’t quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.
“You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes[.]”
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“This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts. I don’t mind so much being haunted by a dead ghost, but I resent like hell being haunted by a half-dead one. I wish to God Buddy’d make up his mind. He does everything else Seymour ever did—or tries to. Why the hell doesn’t he kill himself and be done with it?”
“Those two bastards got us nice and early and made us into freaks with freakish standards, that’s all. We’re the Tattooed Lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed too.”
“You don’t even have enough sense to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup—which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse.”
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“There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. […] And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself.”
