• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1528 0

the Glass family apartment is unique in Salinger’s work. The setting of no other story is so intricately described. Rooms, surroundings, and furniture are consistently ignored by Salinger, while articles of clothing often hold a prominent position in his text. But the clothing of Franny and Zooey is ignored. As characters, they are represented instead by the rooms in which they are encountered. Readers first meet Zooey in the chapel of ego. Franny is encountered in the living room, where the Glass family memories are entombed. More than any other memory, the ghost of Seymour saturates this place. It is a ghost that has driven Franny to silent desperation and Zooey to rage. “This whole goddam house stinks of ghosts,” he wails.

The room also symbolizes Franny’s spiritual and emotional state. Recognizing the setting as being symbolic of Franny allows it to explode with meaning and to foreshadow the story’s eventual epiphany. For aside from Franny and Zooey, the novella’s second scene contains a third character: the sun. When Bessie takes down the old, heavy curtains and the sun washes into the room where Franny cringes on the ancient couch, it allows the outside world—where children are playing on the school steps across the street—into the Glass enclave like light into a tomb.

Zooey attempts to awaken Franny from her malaise by reasoning with her over her obsession with the Jesus Prayer, telling her that she is misusing it. He accuses her of attempting to lay up spiritual treasure by reciting the prayer as a mantra. He then equates the desire for spiritual treasure with the lust for material wealth. Worse still, he accuses Franny of spiritual snobbery, telling her that she is “beginning to give off a little stink of piousness.” He charges his sister with conducting a “little snotty crusade” in which she sees herself as a martyr in a world populated by personal enemies. In other words, she is using the Jesus Prayer to bolster her own self-righteous image and to separate herself from the rest of the world, which she now considers spiritually inferior. Zooey’s speech drives Franny to near hysteria, but he is relentless. He continues by arguing that if she insists upon having a breakdown, she should go back to school rather than have it at home, where she is the baby of the family and keeps her tap shoes in the closet.

Zooey, now caught up in his own tirade, questions the sincerity of Franny’s faith. He asks how she can continue with the Jesus Prayer if she will not accept Christ for who He is. He reminds Franny that when she was a child she was incensed to discover that Jesus had elevated human beings above the sweet, cuddly fowl of the air. That simply didn’t fit in with Franny’s concept of who Jesus should be. To Franny, Jesus should be lovable, more like Saint Francis of Assisi than an angry prophet rudely overturning tables in the temple. Zooey advises Franny that in order to use the Jesus Prayer properly and live a life of constant prayer, she must first see the face of Christ Himself, an ability that he calls “Christ-Consciousness,” a living communion with God. “God almighty, Franny,” he shouts. “If you’re going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all wrapped up in one.”27

“Zooey” contains a number of religious symbols that are unmistakable. However, the beginning of true spiritual revelation for Zooey’s character is sublime in its delicacy. To craft it, Salinger departed from the explanatory nature of his more recent works and reached back into the indistinct softness of his Caulfield era.

In the middle of his argument, Zooey glances out of the window and becomes distracted by a simple scene playing out on the street below. The sight captivates him, but initially he is not sure why. A small girl, about seven years old and wearing a navy blue pea jacket, is playing hide-and-seek with her dog. The girl conceals herself behind a tree, and the unsuspecting dachshund loses sight of her. Distraught and confused, the dog scurries back and forth, desperately