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Franny
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Franny and Zooey, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ego and Conformity
Religion vs. Psychoanalysis
Education vs. Wisdom
Love and Grief
Art and Beauty
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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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.”
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Literary Devices
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.
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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.
