Franny and Zooey

by

J. D. Salinger

Franny and Zooey: Zooey Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
A first-person narrator explains that he’s about to give readers a “prose home movie” that his three main characters have asked him not to share. In particular, the male main character objects that the narrator is engaging in “religious mystification,” which might damage the narrator’s career. The narrator contends that he’s been writing short stories since he was 15 and knows the difference between mysticism and a love story—this is a love story. He further notes that he has pieced together the story from first-person accounts by the main characters, all of whom are his relatives, and that when he appears in the story as Buddy Glass, he’ll refer to himself in the third person.
The introduction of a first-person narrator here rather than at the narrative’s beginning suggests that the first section, “Franny,” was narrated by an impersonal semi-omniscient narrator, whereas the second section, “Zooey,” is narrated by Buddy Glass. However, it remains possible that Buddy narrates both sections and only introduces himself to the reader here. That Buddy has had a fight with one of his main characters about whether this story is about “religious mystification” or “love” hints that both religion and love will be important in the resolution of Franny’s story.
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Twenty-five-year-old Zooey Glass is taking a bath and reading a four-year-old letter one morning in November 1955. Zooey is a thin, slight, beautiful young man, whose beauty is reinforced by the “authentic esprit” of his face. Zooey has been a successful television actor for three years, but he has performed since age seven, when he, his four brothers, and his two sisters hosted a radio show called “It’s A Wise Child.”
When the narrator argues that Zooey’s “authentic esprit” (that is, spirit) reinforces his beauty, the argument implies that authenticity is a necessary component of beauty. Meanwhile, the information readers receive here about Zooey suggests certain parallels and contrasts with Franny: like Franny, Zooey is interested in acting, but unlike her, he has managed to make a successful career of it rather than quitting as she did out of disgust with the inauthenticity, poor artistic quality, and egotism she encountered in the theater.
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In a footnote, the narrator explains that only Zooey and his youngest sibling appear in the story. Their oldest sibling, Seymour, died by suicide nearly seven years prior. The second sibling, Buddy, teaches writing at a girls’ college. The third, Boo Boo, is a housewife. The fourth and fifth are Walt, who died in an accident while serving in the U.S. Army’s occupation of Japan, and Waker, a Catholic priest. 
When the narrator reveals that two of Zooey’s older brothers died young under tragic circumstances, readers may infer that, despite Franny and Zooey’s somewhat contemptuous treatment of psychoanalysis, psychological phenomena like grief and trauma will be important to understanding the Glass family.
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“It’s a Wise Child,” the radio show that the Glass siblings hosted, began in 1927 and ended in 1943. Listeners found the children either horrifically pretentious or “bonafide underage wits.” Most listeners thought Seymour was the best host and Zooey the second-best. All the children, Zooey in particular, interested child psychologists. In 1942, researchers interviewed 12-year-old Zooey five times but determined only that his vocabulary was “on exact par with Mary Baker Eddy’s.”
Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) is the founder of The Church of Christ, Scientist (more commonly known as Christian Science), a religious sect focused on healing through prayer. The psychologists’ comparison of Zooey’s vocabulary to Mary Baker Eddy’s is a narrative joke about the uselessness of psychology as an academic field, since the comparison between the two gives readers no insight into Zooey at all. Yet in the context of Franny’s attempts to resolve her intense mental distress through prayer, the allusion to Christian Science seems purposeful, reminding readers of various spiritual traditions that believe prayer can have healing properties.  
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The letter from Buddy that Zooey is now reading has obviously been reread many times. Dating from March 18, 1951, it begins by complaining about a long letter Buddy has just received from their mother Bessie Glass, which asks Buddy to get rid of the private phone line installed in his and Seymour’s childhood room. He asks Zooey to gently communicate his refusal and goes on to explain that Bessie’s letter also asked Buddy to tell Zooey to get a Ph.D. before he committed to an acting career, so that he would have “something to Fall Back On.”  
Just as the “Franny” section opens with Lane rereading a love letter from Franny that he will subsequently pretend not to care about or remember, so the “Zooey” section opens with Zooey rereading an affectionate letter from his older brother Buddy. The parallel may suggest that, just as Lane cares far more about Franny than he is willing to admit, so Zooey cares far more about his older brother Buddy than he is able to admit or express. Meanwhile, writer Buddy’s comment that their mother wants actor Zooey to have something outside acting to “Fall Back On” (in emphatic capitals) indicates that Bessie Glass lacks her children’s artistic sensibilities.
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Buddy reminds Zooey that Buddy himself doesn’t have a B.A. degree, firstly because in college he found the professors so idiotic that they turned him off finishing college, and secondly because he felt he would never catch up to Seymour, already a Ph.D. Buddy never regrets dropping out of college except when he wonders if a degree would have landed him a better class to teach than “Advanced Writing 24-A.” Yet he suspects all “professional aesthetes” like him are doomed to that kind of teaching.
Earlier, Franny expressed frustration with the “pedants” and “tearer-downers” she encountered in college; here, Buddy admits that he dropped out of college because he thought college was full of idiots. The characters’ frustrations with college hints that, in the view of Franny and Zooey, higher education is not the font of intelligence or wisdom that it ought to be. At the same time, Buddy’s flippant comment about “professional aesthetes” being doomed to teach in college implicitly admits that colleges often do provide necessary financial support, as well as social status, to committed artists.
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Buddy tells Zooey that Zooey’s M.A. qualifies him to teach at prep schools and some colleges, and that in any case, Zooey would probably be a “better-adjusted actor” if Buddy and Seymour hadn’t shared their own academic and religious reading—“the Upanishads and the Diamond Sutra and Eckhart”—with him when he was a kid. Perhaps too much education doesn’t help actors, and in Buddy’s opinion, Zooey is a natural actor. Yet Buddy also worries that if Zooey acts in films, he’ll get artistically unsatisfying roles, and if he acts on stage, he’ll end up in professionally done but not “beautiful” productions of great plays.
The Upanishads are Hindu scriptures that explore the relationship between human beings and divinities; the Diamond Sutra is a widely influential Buddhist text about freeing human beings from all attachments; and Meister Eckhart is Medieval Catholic theologian and mystic who preached extreme detachment. Buddy and Seymour’s reading reveals their interest in both Eastern and Western mystical traditions as potential sources of wisdom, even as Buddy frets that sharing this reading with Zooey may have disadvantaged him in his worldly pursuit of acting. Buddy’s worry that neither film nor TV roles will be “beautiful” enough for Zooey’s aesthetic standards, meanwhile, hints that Buddy and Zooey as well as Franny believe that great art ought to be beautiful.
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Quotes
Buddy reminds Zooey that Seymour died by suicide exactly three years before. He says that he cried all five hours of the flight to Florida to retrieve Seymour’s corpse—and then, just before the plane landed, he heard a woman with a high-class Boston accent talking about a girl’s pus removal, and it made him smile maniacally. When he met Seymour’s widow, he was “grinning.” On this three-year anniversary of Seymour’s death, he feels exactly the same way: ricocheting between grief and humor.
On the one hand, Buddy is trying to be honest with Zooey about his own counterintuitive grief responses—sobbing, then “grinning.” On the other hand, Buddy is admitting these responses to Zooey in a letter written three years after the fact, which indicates that Buddy’s grief has impeded prompt, honest, and direct communication with his younger siblings about his grief.
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Buddy admits that he decided to write to Zooey not because of Mrs. Glass’s letter—she writes him letters all the time worrying about Zooey and Franny (his youngest sister)—but because that day in the supermarket, he saw a little girl with her mother. When he told the little girl she was pretty and asked how many boyfriends she had, the girl said she had two, “Bobby and Dorothy.” That incident made Buddy want to explain why he and Seymour tried to educate Franny and Zooey the way they did: Seymour thought, and Buddy concurred, that education worked better as “a quest […] for no-knowledge,” the divine “state of being” prior to conceptual knowledge.
The connection that Buddy is drawing between the little girl with two “boyfriends” and his and Seymour’s “quest [..] for no-knowledge” is not immediately clear. Yet the brothers’ interest in “no-knowledge,” in pre-conceptual wisdom, indicates that they are more interested in mystical and religious insight than they are in formal education. Their attempts to share mystical wisdom with Franny and Zooey shows their deep love and interest in their younger siblings, even as Buddy ultimately seems to feel guilty about this education and to want to defend or explain it to Zooey.
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In sum, Buddy explains, he and Seymour wanted Franny and Zooey to know about the teachings of the world’s great mystics and wise men before they knew literature, grammar, or math. He acknowledges that Zooey must hold a grudge against him and Seymour, and he hopes that one day, he and Zooey can get drunk and really discuss it.
Again, Buddy is emphasizing that he and Seymour privileged religion and mystical wisdom over traditional formal education, even as he suspects that Zooey must resent him and Seymour for imposing those priorities on Zooey.
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Buddy also apologizes for not visiting much in the aftermath of Seymour’s suicide. Buddy admits that he was afraid of what Franny and Zooey might ask him. But when the little girl in the supermarket told Buddy that her boyfriends’ names were Bobby and Dorothy, Buddy recalled how Seymour once told him that religion should trigger “unlearning the differences” between false binaries like male and female. Buddy felt that he had had an epiphany in the supermarket and longed to write about it to Zooey—but by the time he got home and wrote, he had lost the epiphany.
When Buddy apologizes for not visiting his younger siblings after their oldest brother Seymour died by suicide, he is implicitly admitting that his grief rendered him unable to comfort or relate to the other members of his family despite his great love for them. Here Buddy also explains why the little girl in the supermarket made him think about the mystical education he and Seymour imparted to Franny and Zooey: when the little girl claimed to have one male (Bobby) and one female (Dorothy) “boyfriend,” it made Buddy reflect on gender as a false binary, a form of shallow conceptual knowledge that deeper religious wisdom can help people unlearn. Yet, even years after Seymour’s suicide, Buddy still simultaneously longs to and struggles to communicate what he's thinking and feeling to Zooey.
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Quotes
Buddy ends his letter by ordering Zooey to act to the limits of his ability, beyond what is required by mere “theatrical ingenuity,” and promises that if Zooey does so, he and Seymour will attend with flowers. He also promises Zooey his “affection and support.” After signing off, he writes in a postscript a plea that Zooey will be kind to the parts of the letter that are “merely clever”—as Zooey himself is clever. 
The phrase “theatrical ingenuity” implies skill or cleverness—as opposed to talent or beauty. Thus, when Buddy tells Zooey to exceed “theatrical ingenuity,” he is encouraging his brother to act beautifully, with genius. This encouragement again emphasizes the Glass siblings’ commitment to artistic beauty and artistic genius in a society skeptical of beauty and genius. When Buddy promises Zooey “affection and support,” it shows Buddy’s genuine love of Zooey despite Buddy’s difficulties relating to his younger siblings in the aftermath of Seymour’s suicide. Finally, when Buddy asks forgiveness for being “merely clever,” the implied suspicion or disparagement of cleverness emphasizes that the Glass siblings are less interested in intelligence or knowledge than they are in mystical wisdom.
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When Zooey finishes the letter, he carefully reorders the pages but then stuffs them into their envelope, puts the envelope on the tub’s edge, and fiddles with it until it falls into the water—at which point he retrieves it hastily. He picks up a typewritten manuscript from the bathmat, shoves the letter into the manuscript’s middle, and begins reading the manuscript, in which the role of “Rick” has been underlined. While Zooey is reading overwritten dialogue, Mrs. Glass knocks and tells him to pull the shower curtain because she wants to come in.
Zooey’s careful reordering of Buddy’s letter shows his love for his brother—yet his subsequent careless fiddling with the letter hints at a simultaneous ambivalence (or resentment) toward Buddy. Meanwhile, the overwritten dialogue in the script Zooey is perusing suggests that Buddy was right to worry that TV and film wouldn’t offer Zooey artistically beautiful roles.
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Zooey drops the manuscript to the bathmat, draws the curtain, and irritably calls Mrs. Glass in. Mrs. Glass wears an ancient kimono containing cigarettes and home-improvement tools. She is carrying a package, which she struggles to unwrap. When Zooey demands to know what she’s doing in the bathroom, she explains that she is adding new toothpaste to their (cluttered) medicine cabinet. She wants Zooey to use it instead of tooth powder, which she claims will ruin his enamel. When she asks why Zooey hasn’t spoken to Franny like she asked, he irritably tells her that he talked to Franny for two hours the night previous and wants Mrs. Glass to leave the bathroom.
Surely, Mrs. Glass doesn’t need to put tooth powder in the bathroom cabinet right as Zooey is taking a bath—which suggests that her “errand” is a pretext to ask Zooey about having a talk with Franny. As two of Mrs. Glass’s seven children have died young, one by suicide, it is understandable that she would worry about her remaining children, yet the indirectness with which she approaches Zooey suggests that—like Buddy—she has trouble expressing her grief and worry directly and honestly.
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Mrs. Glass sits down in the bathroom and starts complaining about Buddy’s refusal to get a phone installed. What if he had an accident? Zooey tells her that even if Buddy did have an accident, he cares too much about “privacy” to die where someone could find his corpse. She replies that she’s not talking about anyone dying, but that she wants to get in touch with Buddy about Franny, which she hasn’t managed to do even by calling his neighbors.
Mrs. Glass wants to be able to contact Buddy directly but can’t, a situation indicating both her anxiety about her remaining children’s safety and Buddy’s grief-stricken withdrawal from direct contact with his family. Zooey’s mordant speculation about how Buddy would act if fatally injured seems insensitive given that his brother Walt, Mrs. Glass’s son, died in an accident; such speculation hints at Zooey’s emotional hostility toward Buddy and his mother despite his love for them.
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Abruptly, Mrs. Glass asks whether Zooey has a washcloth. Zooey replies that he doesn’t want a washcloth—he wants Mrs. Glass to leave. Undeterred, Mrs. Glass hands him a cloth around the bath curtain. Then, stumbling upon the manuscript on the mat, Mrs. Glass asks what it is. Zooey doesn’t reply. Mrs. Glass places the manuscript on the radiator, reads the title (“The Heart is an Autumn Wanderer”) aloud, and says the title is “unusual.” Zooey responds by mocking her, calling her heart an “autumn garage.” Mrs. Glass’s enjoyment of Zooey’s cruel wit momentarily distracts her from her worry, but her worry soon returns.
“The Heart is an Autumn Wanderer” sounds like a rip-off of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1940), the debut novel of writer Carson McCullers (1917–1967). The allusion may serve both to indicate that the scripts available to Zooey are disappointingly derivative and that Salinger thought of McCullers’s work as an example of the kind of art his characters would dislike. Zooey’s mockery of Mrs. Glass here indicates that she lacks her children’s exacting artistic standards.
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For a moment, Mrs. Glass and Zooey bicker about unusualness and beauty. Then Mrs. Glass exclaims that she has no idea what to do about Franny and that the children’s father (Les) is no help. She speculates that every time Les turns on the radio, he expects to hear all his children, including Seymour and Walt, on “It’s a Wise Child.” She doesn’t think he has accepted the fact that something is genuinely wrong with Franny—the night previous, after Franny had been crying for hours, he asked whether she’d like a tangerine.
Mrs. Glass mentions her husband’s failure to accept the deaths of their children Seymour and Walt while complaining about his failure to take Franny’s breakdown seriously. When Mrs. Glass draws this connection, it implies that Mrs. Glass herself is overanxiously drawing connections between her son’s deaths and possible dangers to the mentally distressed Franny. In other words, Mrs. Glass has reacted to her two sons’ deaths by becoming (understandably) overanxious and overbearing toward her remaining children.
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Mrs. Glass breaks off complaining to ask what Zooey finds so funny. Zooey claims to find nothing funny and asks who else Mrs. Glass finds unhelpful. Mrs. Glass, irritated, tells him that despite her children’s supposed intelligence, Buddy, Boo Boo, Waker, and Zooey aren’t helping with Franny at all. When Zooey asks whether Mrs. Glass expects Franny’s siblings to “live Franny’s life for her,” Mrs. Glass retorts that she just wants one of them to find out what’s really wrong: Franny won’t even eat the chicken soup Mrs. Glass tried to give her earlier.
Mrs. Glass’s annoyed claim that her children are unhelpful despite their intelligence emphasizes the claim made throughout Franny and Zooey that mere intelligence or cleverness may be less valuable than society believes it to be, particularly in comparison with other virtues like wisdom or lovingness. Her distress that Franny won’t eat her chicken soup—a food traditionally associated with home remedies and healing—indicates that Mrs. Glass feels Franny is rejecting her mother’s love and help.
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When Zooey mocks Mrs. Glass’s fixation on Franny eating chicken soup, Mrs. Glass retorts that a poor diet could contribute to a breakdown: Franny has never liked healthy food. Zooey replies that while he wrote five papers on the Crucifixion in college, he never considered Mrs. Glass’s position, namely, that Christ’s “unhealthy fanaticism” and poor diet were the problem. Mrs. Glass says that she doesn’t think Franny is Christlike—Franny is an “impressionable” girl who has read too many religious books.
When Zooey mockingly suggests that Mrs. Glass would have blamed Christ’s Crucifixion on his “fanaticism” and poor diet, he is implying that Mrs. Glass has failed to understand Franny’s real spiritual and emotional distress and is focusing too much on unimportant material things, represented by Mrs. Glass’s fixation on Franny’s refusal of chicken soup. Mrs. Glass’s response—that Franny’s breakdown is due to her impressionability rather than some genuine existential crisis—does suggest that she fails to understand Franny despite her genuine love for her daughter.
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Zooey asks Mrs. Glass to leave. Mrs. Glass complains that she doesn’t know what to do about the painters: they’ve almost finished Franny’s room, and they’ll want to do the living room next, but Franny’s asleep in there. Zooey yells that he’s about to exit the tub no matter what. The narrator speculates that if Zooey had seen Mrs. Glass’s blue eyes, he might have been gentler—though perhaps not, as her eyes can communicate tragedy not only about events like Seymour’s suicide but also about trivialities. She says she’ll be back, leaves, and closes the door. Zooey gets out of the tub and stares at the door—but with more disapproval of her leaving than relief. 
Zooey rather cruelly ejects his mother from the bathroom but seems unhappy when she leaves. His hostility and ambivalence, combined with his unstated desire for her presence, imply that his grief over his dead brothers and perhaps his worry over Franny lead him to take out his frustration on his mother and not to express the affection and desire for her presence he genuinely feels.
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Quotes
Zooey lathers his face at the bathroom mirror in preparation for a shave. He stares into his own eyes rather than contemplating his entire appearance, part of his “war against narcissism.” Mrs. Glass appears behind him and asks whether getting in touch with Waker could help Franny: while Mrs. Glass thinks Franny needs a therapist, not a priest, she’s willing to entertain other opinions. However, when Mrs. Glass asked whether Franny wanted to talk to Waker, Franny said she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Zooey jokes that of course they won’t listen to Franny.
Zooey’s “war against narcissism” indicates that he, like Franny, worries about becoming an egotist. Meanwhile, Mrs. Glass’s suggestion that Franny needs a therapist rather than a priest shows her adherence to conventional wisdom in contrast with her children’s countercultural spiritual questing.
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Mrs. Glass says that if the issue were “strictly Catholic,” she might help Franny herself, but the children weren’t raised Catholic. Zooey, interrupting, says he’s already told Mrs. Glass that Franny’s problem is “non-sectarian.” Mrs. Glass informs him that she isn’t as stupid as he thinks: she knows that Franny’s little book caused her breakdown. When Zooey asks how she knows, Mrs. Glass explains that Lane has called the house several times.
By having Zooey claim that Franny’s religious crisis is “non-sectarian”—i.e. not associated with one particular religious tradition—the narrative communicates that, despite its interest in religious wisdom, it is not evangelizing for any one religion or spiritual school. By having Mrs. Glass claim that The Way of A Pilgrim caused Franny’s breakdown, meanwhile, the narrative acknowledges the perils as well as the benefits of religious seeking.
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Zooey asks who Lane is. Mrs. Glass retorts that Zooey knows: he’s Franny’s “very sweet” boyfriend. Zooey replies that Lane is “a fake.” If Franny’s breakdown bothered him at all, it was only because it caused him to miss part of the football game. When Mrs. Glass protests that Zooey judges everyone to be “nasty” and “selfish,” Zooey replies that people usually are. Though he only talked to Lane for 20 minutes once, Lane spent the whole time claiming to have listened to “It’s a Wise Child” and praising Zooey—“at Franny’s expense.” Zooey curses all rich, literary young men in college, claiming to prefer con men.
Lane’s interactions with Franny earlier in the narrative revealed him to be a conventional and self-satisfied person who didn’t understand Franny, though he did care about her. Mrs. Glass’s claim that Lane is “very sweet” fails to acknowledge Lane’s smugness and inability to understand Franny, while Zooey’s claim that Lane is just “a fake” who only cared about the football game fails to acknowledge Lane’s real affection for Franny. Thus, the narrative suggests that Mrs. Glass’s own conventionality blinds her to Lane’s faults, while Zooey’s suspicion of conventionality makes him judge Lane too harshly.
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 Mrs. Glass points out that Lane is just a college kid and that Zooey disconcerts people: when he doesn’t like someone, he goes silent on them so that they talk themselves “into a hole.” Zooey looks at Mrs. Glass with surprise, love, and thanks at her insight. Mrs. Glass, accepting his look with “modesty,” tells him kindly that neither he nor Buddy knows how to have a conversation with someone they don’t love—and that such passionate aversions make life impossible.
Mrs. Glass’s insightful description of Zooey’s behavior shows her sensitivity toward and understanding of her beloved children despite her overbearing, anxious behaviors conditioned by grief—and Zooey’s appreciation of her insight shows his love for his mother in turn. Yet Mrs. Glass’s claim that Buddy and Zooey’s passionate natures make their lives difficult shows again her conventionality in contrast with their unconventional, firmly held opinions, loves, and hates.
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Quotes
 Mrs. Glass says that, in any case, Franny says Lane is intelligent. Zooey replies that that’s “sex talking.” Then he asks Mrs. Glass what Lane thinks caused Franny’s breakdown. Excitedly, Mrs. Glass replies that Lane thinks it has to do with the religious little book she checked out of the library. When Mrs. Glass mentions the library, Zooey interrupts to ask again where Lane said she got it. Then he shakes his head. When Mrs. Glass asks Zooey to explain himself, Zooey says that Mrs. Glass has made a “terrible”  mistake: the book is The Pilgrim Continues on His Way, a sequel to The Way of a Pilgrim, and that Franny got both books from the desk in Seymour’s room.
The revelation that Franny got The Way of A Pilgrim and its sequel from Seymour’s desk, not from the library, indicates that Franny’s religious questing and breakdown may have to do with her grief over her older brother’s suicide as well as her disgust at social conformity and egotism. When Zooey calls Mrs. Glass’s mistake “terrible,” he is implicitly claiming that Mrs. Glass should know exactly what books Seymour kept on his desk—a claim that shows Zooey’s own deep love and grief for Seymour despite his frequently hostile, sarcastic exterior.
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 Mrs. Glass reminds Zooey that she never goes into Seymour’s room. Zooey apologizes and suggests they stop talking about it. Mrs. Glass tells him he’s cruel and says that at least Buddy—Zooey, interrupting her, says “Buddy, Buddy, Buddy […] Seymour, Seymour, Seymour.” He says he resents being haunted by ghosts that aren’t fully dead and that he wishes Buddy would make up his mind whether to die by suicide like Seymour. When Mrs. Glass blinks, Zooey averts his eyes from her face but keeps talking. Seymour and Buddy turned him and Franny into “freaks,” he says.
When Mrs. Glass tells Zooey she never goes into Seymour’s room, she is implicitly telling him that her own grief response (avoiding reminders of Seymour) is as legitimate as Zooey’s manner of coping (remembering every book on Seymour’s desk). Zooey’s apology indicates that he takes her point, yet his subsequent explosion—which includes cruelly suggesting to his grief-stricken mother that perhaps Buddy should die by suicide too—shows how his own grief leads to anger. His claim that Seymour and Buddy’s mystical religious education of him and Franny turned them into “freaks,” meanwhile, hints that Zooey wishes he could conform to social expectations—but he feels unable to do so.
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Zooey says that he can’t have a conversation—he either gets “bored” or “preachy”—and he can’t eat without first saying the Four Great Vows. When Mrs. Glass asks what the vows are, Zooey recites aloud the Four Great Vows of Buddhism and says that he’s repeated them before every meal since age 10. Once he tried not to, and he choked on his food.   
Zooey’s claim that his mystical education makes him “bored” or “preachy” with other people indicates that the religious quest for wisdom can unfit an individual for social conformity—rendering them lonely, alienated, and unlikable.
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 Zooey asks Mrs. Glass to leave. She replies that she wishes he’d get married. Though Zooey is used to Mrs. Glass’s abrupt changes of topic, this one makes him explode into a laugh—or possibly its “opposite.” When Mrs. Glass asks why Zooey doesn’t get married, he tells her it’s because married men never get the window seat on trains. She tells him he needs a haircut. He smiles, but then he orders her to remember how much analysis helped Seymour before she tries to get Franny in to see a psychoanalyst.
Mrs. Glass’s wish that Zooey would get married is a loving wish for Zooey’s happiness—but also a wish that he would conform to social expectations surrounding romance and reproduction. When Zooey tells her to remember that psychoanalysis failed to avert Seymour’s suicide, he is reminding her that conventional solutions to individual problems don’t necessarily work—and revealing that, despite his earlier mockery of Mrs. Glass, he too is deeply worried about Franny’s mental health.
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When Mrs. Glass protests that she was only thinking about a psychoanalyst, Zooey tells her that if she finds an analyst who coaxes people into accepting the banality and horror of modern life, the psychoanalysis will send Franny straight to an asylum or into real religious fanaticism. The only psychoanalyst who might help Franny is one who believes that he helps his patients “through the grace of God.”
Zooey characterizes most psychoanalysis as teaching people to conform to a broken society—to conclude falsely that their horror at a broken society is their individual problem, not a problem with the world around them. By implication, he believes that Franny’s breakdown is at least partially a legitimate response to an awful social reality, not merely a sign of mental health problems in her. His claim that she might benefit from a psychoanalyst who believes he works “through the grace of God,” meanwhile, shows his understanding that Franny wants to find humility and religious interest in the people around her rather than egocentrism and secular scorn for her spiritual questions.
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Zooey says that if Mrs. Glass will keep silent, he’ll tell her about the little books. When Mrs. Glass agrees, Zooey explains that they’re about a Russian peasant who begins a pilgrimage to understand the Bible passage that instructs people to pray constantly. The peasant meets a monk, who tells him to say the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”—without any “emphasis” on the full prayer’s traditional ending, “a miserable sinner,” to Zooey’s relief). Once the peasant can pray constantly, he travels Russia teaching others the prayer.
The traditional Jesus Prayer, translated into English, is “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” When Zooey remembers the ending as “a miserable sinner” and criticizes the emphasis on sin, it indicates that he is interested in the mystical effects of constant prayer but not necessarily in Christian theology of sin and redemption—and that he thinks the theological concept of sin might be in some way dangerous or harmful. Thus, Zooey is revealed to be a spiritual quester but not an unthinking proponent of every theology he encounters.
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Zooey goes on to explain that while The Way of A Pilgrim mostly deals with the people the peasant meets on his pilgrimage, its sequel is a dialogue between the peasant, an academic, a monk, and another holy man about the Jesus Prayer. Both books intend to show the benefits of the Jesus Prayer—not just to religious fanatics, but to people who start out praying mechanically and end up enlightened. Zooey is explaining comparable concepts in Eastern religions when, abruptly, he looks into the medicine cabinet and asks who’s used his “orange stick.”
When Zooey distinguishes between religious fanatics and people who take up the Jesus Prayer mechanically to seek enlightenment, he is again suggesting that the little books could symbolize an intolerant fanaticism and distinguishing that reaction from his own and Franny’s interest in religious mysticism, which is more tolerant, ecumenical, and interested in Eastern as well as Western traditions.
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When Mrs. Glass asks whether Franny has been saying the Jesus Prayer, Zooey tells Mrs. Glass to ask Franny. Mrs. Glass asks how long you have to say the prayer. Zooey, suddenly animated, claims that if you say it for a moment, “saints and bodhisattvas” will bring you chicken soup. When Mrs. Glass tells him to stop, Zooey continues sarcastically, telling her that he wouldn’t want her to think religious seeking could involve difficulty of any kind. 
A saint is an exceptionally holy person, while a bodhisattva is a person on the path to Buddhist enlightenment. Zooey is mocking Mrs. Glass by suggesting that such figures would bring anyone chicken soup, suggesting that Mrs. Glass is too concerned with comfort and convenience, not concerned enough with wisdom or religious truth.
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Zooey tells Mrs. Glass to get out—he needs to meet someone called LeSage at 2:30 and would like to complete some errands before then. Mrs. Glass asks whether he’ll speak to Franny. Zooey tells her to stop asking him: if he could think of something good to say to Franny, he would. Mrs. Glass, shuffling from the room, says that she doesn’t know what became of her children: when they were young, they were affectionate and kind—and she doesn’t know what good their intelligence is “if it doesn’t make [them] happy.”
When Mrs. Glass contrasts her children’s openly loving behavior with their adult guardedness, it suggests that their grief over Seymour and Walt’s deaths changed them, making it more difficult for them to express their real love for one another. Meanwhile, her claim that her children’s intelligence seems useless “if it doesn’t make [them] happy” continues the narrative’s critique of mere intelligence as less valuable than conventional society would have people believe.
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In the cluttered living room, Franny is asleep on the sofa. The living room has in no way been prepared for painting: the walls are covered with various photos and plaques relating to “It’s a Wise Child,” hung by Les Glass. The sun shining through the windows reveals the dilapidation of the furniture. Zooey enters, moves some things off a coffee table near the sofa, sits on the table, and gently shakes Franny. Franny, startling awake, says that she had a nightmare: she was at a pool, and everyone kept making her dive for a can of coffee at the bottom, and a few of them tried to hit her with oars. The only thing about the nightmare that made sense was the presence of Professor Tupper, as she knows he hates her.
Les Glass has hung mementos of his children’s radio show all over the living room walls—and he hasn’t taken any down despite the deaths of two of his sons, Seymour and Walt. This small detail shows Les’s love for his children, his ongoing grief, and the “hauntedness” of the Glass apartment by dead loved ones. Meanwhile, Franny’s nightmare—in which a crowd of people is forcing her to perform a meaningless activity she has no desire to do—represents her experience of being pressured by her peers to conform socially, which she finds an alienating and violent experience.
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Zooey asks why Professor Tupper hates Franny. Franny explains that he’s the “phony” who teaches her Religion seminar, and she can’t make herself smile when he’s being “charming.” She speculates that he musses his hair before seminar to give it an intellectual look. Zooey tells her she looks terrible and asks why she won’t eat some chicken soup. Franny expresses her utter frustration with chicken soup.
When Franny calls Professor Tupper a “phony” who tries to be “charming,” she is claiming that he is an inauthentic person, too focused on making others like him. Instead of engaging with Franny’s existential complaint about other people’s inauthenticity, Zooey asks why she won’t eat—despite his having mocked Mrs. Glass earlier for her worries about Franny’s lack of appetite. Thus, the chicken soup vacillates between being a symbol of narrow material interests and a symbol of family love and concern.
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 Zooey is distracted by Bloomberg the cat, who has been hiding under Franny’s blankets. Franny showers the unimpressed cat with affection; then she asks Zooey about his script. Zooey changes the subject to the sheet music on the piano stand, but when Franny persists, he starts ranting that Dick Hess asked Zooey to meet for a drink at 1 a.m. the previous night. At the meeting, Dick—a writer from Des Moines now living in New York—ranted at Zooey about his family of “psychopathic prodigies” and then shoved the script at him. In the middle of complaining about writers, Zooey is distracted by a fish tank; he claims the fish “look starved” and likely need chicken soup.
Zooey’s conflict with scriptwriter Dick Hess, who insultingly calls the unconventional Glass family “psychopathic prodigies,” underscores the larger conflict between Zooey’s artistic dreams as an actor and the conventional, banal scripts that are offered to him. Meanwhile, his offhand claim that his underfed fish need “chicken soup” further suggests that chicken soup represents not only material concerns but also the kind of homely love and care the fish have clearly not been receiving.
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 Franny clarifies that Zooey now has two scripts, one from Mr. LeSage and one from Dick Hess. Zooey complains that the LeSage script is a retro comedy modernized with psychoanalytic jargon, while the Hess script would cast Zooey as a “sensitive young subway guard” in an inauthentically heartwarming narrative. Suddenly, Zooey comments that Franny’s lips are moving and asks whether she’s praying away Zooey’s “un-Christian attitude to the popular arts.” Franny shakes her head but keeps praying.
Zooey’s criticism of the LeSage script once again shows his hostility toward psychoanalysis, which he implicitly judges a hollow, false form of knowledge, while his criticism of the Hess script suggests his dislike of unearned sentimentality in art. That Zooey’s rant against contemporary scripts causes Franny to start praying hints that Franny is trying to use religious mysticism as a bulwark against the kind of shallowness and inauthenticity that Zooey is criticizing—with an ”un-Christian,” i.e. uncharitable, ferocity—in TV scripts.
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 Zooey, now pacing the room, asks Franny whether he mentioned that he might travel to France to shoot a film. Franny says no and asks about the film. Zooey explains that he has partially persuaded a French backer to adapt for film the Lenormand novel he once sent to Franny. When Franny expresses enthusiasm, Zooey says that he doesn’t want to leave New York, where he was born and raised: “I hate any kind of so-called creative type who gets on any kind of ship.”
“Lenormand” here likely refers to Henri-René Lenormand (1882–1951), a French writer known primarily as a playwright. When Zooey says he hates “any kind of so-called creative type” who travels, he’s indirectly claiming that true artists stay connected to their authentic selves by remaining close to their roots—and that artists who move to fashionable urban centers or abroad are likely to lose their authenticity.
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 Franny—her lips still moving between sentences—asks why Zooey travels, then. Zooey says it’s because he’s tired of being so judgmental that he makes everyone he interacts with feel mediocre and shallow, like they lack internal standards and only care what others think. Franny says that she does the same thing: she wrecked Lane’s game day simply by sharing her critical opinions with him. Zooey tells her that they should criticize themselves, not other people: Seymour and Buddy turned them into “freaks with freakish standards” that they foist on others.
Here, Zooey and Franny engage in self-criticism: both acknowledge that their education in religious mysticism and obsession with wisdom make them nonconformist—and, as a result, they are sometimes unpleasant for conventional people to be around. Zooey casts his and Franny’s unconventionality in a highly negative light when he calls them “freaks” (a charged pejorative for a conventional person) with “freakish standards,” a description suggesting that Zooey and Franny demand too much from the people around them.
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 Zooey says that he and Franny never recovered from “It’s a Wise Child”—they can’t have normal conversations because they’re too busy monologuing. The previous night, when Dick told Zooey the plot of his script, Zooey tore into the script’s sentimentality and left Dick wretched. Yet Zooey likes Dick’s offbeat dress sense, ego, and enthusiasm for TV. He likes LeSage and LeSage’s pretentious arrogance too.
Zooey gives a concrete example of the way his unconventionality and high artistic standards alienate more conventional people: even though he likes Hess, he made Hess feel terrible by harshly criticizing the script Hess had just written.
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 Zooey admits to Franny that Dick makes him sad or angry because Dick’s first script was decent. Zooey played a young, dissatisfied farmer who sells the family farm after his father’s death and moves to the city but ends up missing his cows so badly he hallucinates one on a city street, runs after it into traffic, and dies. Even if the script wasn’t great, it was authentic to Dick, not “part of a hackneyed trend.” Zooey wishes that Dick would travel back home to Iowa and get authentic inspiration. He hates ruining Dick and LeSage’s pleasure over bad scripts.
In this moment, readers get a concrete example of what Zooey meant when he said he hated artists who travel: Zooey judged Hess’s first script to be decent because it authentically reflected Hess’s Iowan background rather than chasing “a hackneyed trend,” whereas Hess’s subsequent scripts since moving to New York City have lacked that authenticity.
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Franny, having turned very pale, tells Zooey that his preoccupations remind her of what she was trying to say to Lane. For a month before that point, she had managed to keep quiet when other people acted “phony” or egotistical, but then, one morning, she went into her college’s literature building, wrote quotations from Epictetus all over a blackboard, erased them, and started criticizing people. Especially in class, she had this idea that chasing knowledge wasn’t different from chasing money or status unless knowledge produced “wisdom”—but the only time she heard the word “wise” used in college was to describe a highly conventional old politician.
Epictetus (c. 50–135 CE), a Stoic philosopher in ancient Greece, argued that, because human beings ultimately lack control over what happens to them, they accept what comes and focus solely on adhering to an internal standard of behavior. Epictetus’s focus on adherence to an internal standard reflects Franny’s obsessive focus on authenticity over “phoniness.” When Franny criticizes how her college education ignored wisdom, meanwhile, she suggests that wisdom is something different—and far better—than mere intelligence or knowledge.
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Zooey, watching Franny intently, asks her why she has taken up the Jesus Prayer. Her attachment to the prayer disturbs him, and he wants her to explain her motives, because as far as he can see there’s no difference between greed for “material,” “intellectual,” or “spiritual treasure.” Tremulously, Franny informs him that she has the same fears about having greedy or egotistical motives—those fears are precisely what’s driven her to a breakdown!
Zooey is criticizing Franny’s desire to say the Jesus Prayer as internally inconsistent on the grounds that, while Franny is trying to escape egotism, all desires—including for “good” things like wisdom or spiritual fulfillment—are fundamentally egotistical. Thus, even Franny’s attempt to escape ego demonstrates her ego. Franny herself reveals that she has already recognized this Catch-22—hence her breakdown.
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Zooey asks whether he should try to get Buddy on the phone for Franny; he thinks she should talk to someone, but he doesn’t feel competent to do it. Franny—at first very quietly, then audibly—says she wants to talk to Seymour. Zooey stares out the window: across the street, a little girl is reuniting with her dog after school. He announces that the world contains lovely phenomena and that people shouldn’t get distracted by “our lousy little egos.”
When Franny says that she wants to talk to Seymour, it hints that her spiritual preoccupations and her nervous breakdown are at least partially symptoms of grief for Seymour, who was a kind of spiritual mentor to her and Zooey. Zooey’s claim that “our lousy little egos” shouldn’t distract us from the beauty of the world, meanwhile, suggests that egotism—including self-involved suffering—prevents people from noticing beautiful, good, happy, and hopeful events all around them.
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Zooey tells Franny that Buddy made an intelligent comment to him once. After a theatrical pause, during which Franny waits with interest, Zooey says that Buddy told him a man dying of a cut throat should still be able to appreciate a woman beautifully balancing a jug on her head. Then he comments that every member of the Glass family “gets his religion in a different package.” For example, Walt once said that God punishes people with bad karma for failing to see the beauty of the world. Franny enjoys this digression.
Buddy’s aphorism about the man with the cut throat vividly illustrates the claim that Zooey just made: namely, that even if you are in terrible pain, that shouldn’t prevent you from recognizing and appreciating good things outside yourself. When Zooey moves directly from relating Buddy’s aphorism to talking about their dead brother Walt’s religious beliefs, the unexplained transition implies both that appreciating beauty can be a form of religious activity and that Zooey—like Franny—is thinking about individual suffering and impersonal beauty with reference to the Glass family’s grief over Seymour and Walt. 
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Abruptly, Zooey announces that he needs to get to his lunch meeting. Then he lies down on the carpet and tells Franny that after he leaves, she can pray as much as she likes—but he tells her not to cry. Zooey and Franny bicker about whether he’s going to criticize her, and Franny, unwillingly amused, calls him the “most unsympathetic person.” Suddenly serious, Zooey tells her that he’s not trying to convince her to stop saying the Jesus Prayer. In fact, when he was younger, he once went looking for a “pilgrim-type rucksack” with the intention of imitating the peasant’s journey—so perhaps he’s merely envious of Franny.
Though Franny claims that Zooey is an “unsympathetic person,” his admission that he once went shopping for a “pilgrim-type rucksack” to emulate the protagonist of The Way of A Pilgrim shows that he can sympathize with Franny—he too once wanted to reject the shallow, conventional world through religious mysticism. Yet his ultimate decision not to take that path suggests that he decided rejecting the world was too extreme.
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 That said, Zooey tells Franny that her breakdown is very hard on Mrs. Glass and Les and that her behavior smacks of “piousness.” Moreover, he dislikes her “blanket attack” on college. While he agrees with many of her criticisms, he also did have one genuinely good professor, one with “wisdom,” during his own undergraduate career. And he mistrusts Franny’s “personal” hatred of academic phonies like Professor Tupper, which seems distinct from her “war against the System.” Zooey admits that he too indulges in “personal” hatred of film and television culture’s failures—so he knows what he’s talking about.
“Piousness” can mean either genuine religious devoutness or false, hypocritical, showy religiosity—in context, Zooey clearly means the latter: he thinks that Franny is being too performative in her spiritual seeking. When he criticizes her “blanket attack” on college, meanwhile, he argues that while college professors aren’t necessarily wise just because they’re knowledgeable, some of them are wise—and that, moreover, it’s wrong to hate individual people for conforming: you should hate “the System,” the conformist society itself, instead.
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Zooey tells Franny he has one last, crucial piece of advice for her. Then he asks whether she remembers her rebellion against the New Testament. Annoyed, Franny tells Zooey that she was 10 at the time. Zooey says he doesn’t think she understands Jesus any better now—and she shouldn’t say the Jesus Prayer if she doesn’t understand Jesus. He reminds her what occasioned her rebellion: she thought Jesus overturning the money tables in the temple was rude, and she disliked his claim in Matthew Six that humans matter more to God than birds. Zooey accuses Franny of being unable to love a Jesus who cares more about Professor Tupper than a cute baby bird.
In Matthew 21:12–13 and Mark 11:15–18, Jesus drives people engaged in secular, predatory economic activity out of the temple area, claiming that they are turning a religious space into a “den of robbers.” In Matthew 6:26, Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about money matters because God, who provides food for the birds, will certainly provide for “much more valuable” human beings. These biblical citations illustrate Jesus’s characteristic harshness toward economically predatory behavior and his special concern with human beings over and above other animals in creation. Evidently, young Franny thought Jesus’s harshness was rude and disliked that he valued every human being above any bird. Zooey is criticizing Franny for praying to Jesus while refusing to accept his radical love and valuation of every single human being, including “phonies” like Professor Tupper.
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 Stung, Franny asks whether Zooey can love that Jesus. Zooey says that in fact he can: unlike most Christians, he feels no need to make Jesus “lovable” by reinterpreting him as St. Francis of Assisi. Yet he believes that that’s what Franny is doing, and he thinks it’s intellectually lazy. When Franny begs Zooey to stop, Zooey says he will—but first he demands to know how she distinguishes between what’s egotistical and what’s genuine. He tells her that she’d never have wanted Emily Dickinson to crush the egotistical urge to write poetry, but she wants Professor Tupper to kill his ego.  
St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) is the patron saint of animals and environmentalism. As an individual he practiced extreme voluntary poverty and founded a religious order, the Franciscans, who also practice poverty, but he is not associated with harsh structural critiques of economic injustice the way that Jesus is. When Zooey accuses Franny of wanting Jesus to be St. Francis of Assisi, he is accusing her of wanting Jesus to be “nicer” and fonder of cute animals. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is a highly influential American poet; when Zooey claims that Dickinson’s artistic vocation was “egotistical,” he is suggesting that—contrary to Franny’s entirely negative take on egotism—it can compel people to produce beautiful art. Thus, implicitly, Zooey is saying that Franny shouldn’t necessarily hate and reject ego. 
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Zooey theorizes that it isn’t ego, but lack of ego, that causes problems: people like Professor Tupper or Mr. LeSage have given up their true egos and make do with “hobbies.” By this point, Franny is crying hard. Zooey concludes that he’s not actually trying to stop her from saying the Jesus Prayer, but he still doesn’t believe that she tries to understand Jesus as he was—and frankly, Zooey doesn’t know why anyone would want Jesus to be different than he is: in union with God, sure that people had the Kingdom of God inside themselves, demanding and without sentimentality.
Zooey’s suggestion that the real problem with conformists is their lack of ego suggests that, up to this point, Franny and Zooey have been equivocating on the word ego, using it to refer both to the desire for social approval and, contradictorily, to stubborn, selfish individualism. Zooey is arguing here that the former type of egotism (craving praise, approval, and social approbation) causes problems while the latter form (insisting on one’s individuality, including one’s authentic artistic expressions) is beneficial. Zooey’s sudden outburst of enthusiasm for the demanding, unsentimental Jesus of the Gospels, meanwhile, suggests that Zooey, like Franny, is a religious seeker who has looked to Jesus as a model—but he interprets Jesus differently than Franny does. 
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 Abruptly, Zooey stops his rant and listens, perhaps for the first time, to Franny’s sobbing. He turns white from sympathy and recognition of his own “failure.” He looks like a boy who loves animals who has just seen his sister recoil from his present to her—a cobra with a bow around its neck. He apologizes and exits.
When the narrator compares Zooey to an animal-lover who realizes his sister doesn’t want his gift of a scary pet snake, the comparison implies that Zooey is a true lover of Jesus—like the cobra, a difficult and frightening figure—but fails to convince Franny, who wants only the easily likable parts of Jesus, to share that love. In other words, Zooey has failed to communicate what religious wisdom he has to his sister.
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On Zooey’s way out, he encounters Mrs. Glass, who asks whether he talked to Franny. Zooey says that he did and that Mrs. Glass should go check on her: she’s crying. When Mrs. Glass asks why, he claims not to know, flees down the hall, and enters Seymour and Buddy’s old room for the first time in years. After he closes the door, he examines a board hung on it containing handwritten quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Tolstoy, and other religious and literary figures. Then he sits down at the desk and puts his face in his hands.
The Bhagavad Gita, part of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, is an important scripture in Hinduism. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161 to180, was an influential Stoic philosopher like the slightly earlier Epictetus. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a famous Russian novelist also known for his pacifistic and mystical Christianity. The various religious, philosophical, and literary figures quoted in Seymour and Buddy’s room emphasize their intense seeking after spirituality and wisdom. When Zooey puts his face in his hands after looking at these quotations, it represents his sense that he has failed to help Franny in her spiritual crisis despite the education he received from Seymour and Buddy—who are no longer around to help their younger siblings.
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Zooey sits unmoving at Seymour’s desk for 20 minutes. Then he opens the desk drawer, removes some shirt cardboards, and finds one that Seymour had dated February 1938 and written on about how his family celebrated his 21st birthday. Zooey stops reading, puts the cardboards back in the desk, and sits unmoving for another 30 minutes. Then he switches from Seymour’s desk to Buddy’s desk, where the phone is, and dials “a very local number.”
When Zooey can’t finish reading Seymour’s account of his 21st birthday, it shows his still acute grief over Seymour’s suicide. Meanwhile, Zooey’s decision to dial a “very local number” from Buddy’s phone may hint that—in Buddy’s painful absence—Zooey will somehow take on Buddy’s persona.
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In the living room, Franny is yet again refusing chicken soup from Mrs. Glass. When Mrs. Glass protests that she doesn’t know how Franny will get well without eating, Franny begins to tell her that the thought of soup sickens her—until she cuts herself off, hearing the phone. Mrs. Glass goes to answer it; she comes back and says that Buddy (who sounds as though he has a cold) has called and wants to speak with Franny. Hesitatingly, growing more and more childlike, Franny walks to her parents’ bedroom. 
Mrs. Glass’s continued insistence that Franny eat chicken soup emphasizes the soup’s dual symbolism: it simultaneously shows Mrs. Glass’s lack of understanding of Franny’s spiritual crisis and her deep maternal love for her daughter. Meanwhile, Franny’s hesitation and increasing childlikeness as she walks to the phone suggests that she simultaneously fears and longs for contact with her absentee older brother.
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Franny sits on her parents’ bed, stares at the phone on the night table, and—at last—answers it. The voice on the other end asks how Franny is doing. Franny notes that “Buddy” sounds as though he has a bad cold and asks what Mrs. Glass told him about her. A pause ensues—very like Buddy’s pauses, which had often annoyed “both Franny and the virtuoso at the other end of the phone.” Then the voice says that Mrs. Glass told him any number of things, including about Franny’s unhealthy diet and the Pilgrim books
Both Mrs. Glass and Franny note that “Buddy” sounds strange on the phone, hinting that something is amiss. The narrator’s statement that Buddy’s pauses annoy “the virtuoso on the other end of the phone” reveals that said “virtuoso” is not Buddy. Meanwhile, when the voice says that Mrs. Glass has told him both about Franny’s unhealthy diet and about the Pilgrim books, it suggests that from a certain point of view, the Pilgrim books constitute an “unhealthy” religious diet—one that makes Franny more alienated and more intolerant of others rather than spiritually wiser.
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Buddy” asks whether Franny feels like talking. Franny says that Zooey has been criticizing her the entire morning—that he is a “destructive” person, mocking her investment in the Jesus Prayer one minute and praising Jesus the next. He’s “bitter” about religion, TV, and Seymour and Buddy—he blames his older brothers for making him and Franny into “freaks.” The voice on the phone asks what Zooey’s definition of freak is. Franny says Zooey has too many definitions. Then she says that once, Zooey told her that when he was eight, he had a glass of ginger ale with Jesus in the kitchen—which makes her feel she and Zooey are both asylum inmates, but Zooey is pretending to be one of the doctors.
Earlier in the narrative, during Franny’s conversation with Lane, she described herself as feeling “destructive” while apologizing for her criticisms of conformity and egotism. Now Franny describes Zooey with the same word, “destructive.” The repetition implies that Zooey’s criticism of Franny comes from the same place as Franny’s criticism of conformity in higher education and society at large: Zooey fears that Franny’s use of the Jesus Prayer is inauthentic and self-regarding, not springing from true religious feeling. Notably, Franny is simultaneously criticizing Zooey and acknowledging her similarity to him: she compares herself and him to inmates of a mental asylum and is angry primarily because he's pretending to be a doctor—that is, pretending that he isn’t afflicted by the same psychological and spiritual torments as Franny. 
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Buddy” makes a flippant remark—and suddenly, Franny realizes it’s Zooey. She demands that he stop faking and that, if he has anything to say, to say it immediately. Zooey says that he called to tell her to continue with the Jesus Prayer if she wants; he has no right to speak to her the way he did. That said, he does feel that since she came home to have her breakdown, she deserves no more than the “low-grade spiritual counsel” the other Glasses can provide. Moreover, Franny has overlooked the real religion in the house, such as Mrs. Glass’s “consecrated chicken soup”—and if Franny can’t recognize the holiness of her mother’s chicken soup, how would she recognize a real spiritual teacher? Can she explain it?
Why did Zooey pretend to be Buddy when he called Franny rather than apologizing to her as himself right away? Zooey’s crack about giving “low-grade spiritual counsel” hints that he feels insufficiently wise or religious to help Franny as himself, yet he still feels a desire and responsibility to help her anyway. Moreover, Zooey may believe that Franny’s breakdown derives from suppressed grief over Seymour’s suicide and Buddy’s subsequent absenteeism from family life as well as from social alienation; as such, he may have pretended to be Buddy to ease Franny’s grief. Meanwhile, when Zooey calls Mrs. Glass’s chicken soup “consecrated,” he is essentially saying that Mrs. Glass’s love for her children has made her chicken soup “holy.” This claim contrasts with Zooey’s earlier mockery of the chicken soup and suggests that all along, Zooey saw and appreciated the love motivating Mrs. Glass’s actions but was unable to verbalize his appreciation to her. 
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Franny sits up very straight and says that she can’t explain it. Then she asks where Zooey is calling from. Zooey claims it doesn’t matter. Then he admits that he and Buddy went to see Franny when she was acting in Playboy of the Western World—and that she was excellent. He scolds her for being shocked that many people in acting care about money, not art, and he counsels her that what matters in religion is “detachment.” He advises her to follow her desire to be an actress: “be God’s actress, if you want to.” 
Earlier, Franny said that her role in the J. M. Synge play Playboy of the Western World met her artistic standards, unlike many other poorly written roles that she was ashamed to act. Here, Zooey reveals that he and Buddy went to support Franny but didn’t tell her about it at the time—a repressed and indirect expression of love characteristic of the grief-stricken Glass siblings. In Christian mystical thought, “detachment” can refer to a lack of interest in worldly concerns; it can also refer to emptying oneself of worldly desires to join one’s will to God’s will. When Zooey advises Franny to embrace detachment and “be God’s actress,” he is suggesting that her acting need not be an expression of her narrow individual egotism or her petty worldly concerns; she can attempt to act beautifully and authentically from a religious, even a divine, motive.
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Zooey says he has one more thing to say to Franny before he stops. He remembers her complaining about stupid audiences—but actors shouldn’t care about that, only aim for their own “perfection.” He tells her that one night, when he was performing on “It’s a Wise Child” and furious about the audience, Seymour told him to shine his shoes anyway—“for the Fat Lady.” Seymour never explained what he meant, but Zooey shined his shoes for the Fat Lady every single time he performed afterwards. He used to picture the Fat Lady, who he imagined had cancer, on her porch listening to the radio all the time.
In Zooey’s anecdote, Seymour encourages Zooey to shine his shoes to perform on a radio show—where no one in the audience will be able to see Zooey’s shoes. This advice represents how artists ought to strive for “perfection” even if the artists themselves will be the only ones who can appreciate it—even if no one in their audience can see or appreciate the beauty of what they’re doing. 
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Franny stands up, holding the phone, and tells Zooey that Seymour once told her to “be funny for the Fat Lady.” She too imagined that the Fat Lady had cancer. When Zooey asks Franny whether she’s listening, Franny nods. Zooey says that every audience member is the Fat Lady, including Professor Tupper—and that the Fat Lady is Jesus Christ. Franny is so ecstatic that she can barely hold the phone. After 30 seconds of silence, Zooey says he can’t talk any longer and hangs up. Franny listens to the dial tone for a while as if it is beautiful music; then she hangs up the phone, climbs into her parents’ bed, and falls into a peaceful sleep.
Rather than channeling Buddy, Zooey is now channeling Seymour—the beloved older brother whom both Zooey and Franny are grieving—to give Franny wise (and theologically orthodox) advice about following Jesus: Franny ought to strive for her own perfection and treat everyone around her as if they were Jesus Christ rather than criticizing and loathing others for their inauthenticity and conformity. This advice, especially its channeling of Seymour, seems to resolve Franny’s intense spiritual and artistic distress, suggesting that addressing her spiritual problems as spiritual problems rather than psychoanalytic symptoms was the right approach all along.
Themes
Ego and Conformity Theme Icon
Religion vs. Psychoanalysis Theme Icon
Love and Grief Theme Icon
Art and Beauty Theme Icon
Quotes