Franny and Zooey: Analysis of Major Characters
"Franny and Zooey" is a novel by J.D. Salinger that revolves around the lives of the Glass siblings, particularly focusing on Franny and Zooey. Franny Glass, a 21-year-old college student and aspiring actress, grapples with her disillusionment with the superficiality of contemporary culture, leading her into a profound spiritual and psychological crisis. During a lunch with her self-absorbed boyfriend, Lane, whose shallow nature exacerbates her feelings of isolation, Franny experiences a breakdown. Her brother, Zooey Glass, a successful television actor, aims to help her navigate this turmoil, despite his own struggles with empathy and self-awareness.
Zooey, with his sharp honesty and high standards, challenges Franny's motives and encourages her to return to acting, suggesting she do it with a spiritual purpose. The dynamics among the Glass siblings are deeply influenced by their late brother Seymour, a gifted poet whose tragic suicide haunts them all. The narrative explores themes of existential angst, the search for authenticity, and the burdens of self-consciousness that the characters carry, making it a complex exploration of familial relationships and individual crises. Each character embodies aspects of the Glass family’s legacy of intellect, creativity, and emotional struggle, enriching the story's depth and resonance.
Franny and Zooey: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: J. D. Salinger
First published: “Franny,” 1955; “Zooey,” 1957; novel, 1961
Genre: Short fiction
Locale: New England and New York City
Plot: Philosophical realism
Time: November, 1955
Frances (Franny) Glass, the youngest of the seven extraordinary Glass children and focus of the “Franny” section of the book. She is a bright twenty-one-year-old college student and gifted actress who is in painful conflict with herself and the world. She is uneasy with the superficiality of her surroundings and their clash of egos. Her profound wish is for a spiritual dimension that would give her life a substance beyond all the posturing, grasping, and self-absorption that threatens to engulf her. Repressing her own feelings, she observes and feels guilty about her own disingenuousness. She is disgusted by her culture's artistic, educational, and religious forms of pretentiousness. In contrast to her pedantic boyfriend, she sees her deceased brother Seymour as the apotheosis of the pure poet. While having lunch at a fashionable restaurant with her boyfriend, she breaks out in a cold sweat and faints in the restroom. She feels that she is losing her mind and experiences an acute spiritual and psychological crisis. As a young woman who espouses self-effacement, she fears that as an aspiring actress she may be heading down the path of narcissism. A breakdown follows, and she quits the theater. She recuperates at her family's apartment in Manhattan with the help of her brother Zooey.
Lane Coutell, an Ivy League undergraduate and Franny Glass's boyfriend. He is shallow, pretentious, intellectually pedantic, and arrogant. He views Franny as an attractive object that enhances his own ego. Zooey Glass refers to Lane as a “big nothing.” He is too self-absorbed to take note of Franny's impending breakdown.
Zachary Martin “Zooey” Glass, the youngest Glass son, a handsome and successful television actor. His honesty, talent, and unwavering standards of behavior leave most of those he encounters feeling stunned and Zooey himself with an ulcer. Before they are able to read, he and Franny receive an education in the great mystical and religious traditions from their older brothers Buddy and Seymour; Franny and Zooey both are haunted by the remnants of this early education. Zooey's lack of sympathy for the failings of others makes him a very unlikely person to help Franny during her breakdown. He cannot help challenging her motives for breaking down and her choice of the family couch as the stage for what he views as theatrical behavior. He calls Franny and pretends to be Buddy; in his own way, Zooey tries to comfort and guide his sister through her spiritual crisis. Exhorting Franny to return to her chosen profession of acting, he asks that she do it for God, if necessary.
Buddy Glass, Franny's favorite brother. He is a writer and recluse, the chief chronicler of the family saga. He is the author/compiler of the “Zooey” section of the book. Salinger's fiction is that Buddy is the actual author of some of Salinger's work, thus reinforcing the notion that the Glasses are flesh-and-blood creatures. In his preface to “Zooey,” Buddy reveals that Zooey, Franny, and Mrs. Glass have separately advised him on reconstructing their stories. Each also finds fault with Buddy's finished product. Buddy refers to “Zooey” not as a long short story or novella but as a “prose home movie,” an artistic creation designed for in-house viewing, a form of discourse in which events are captured by Buddy's camera eye and translated into images that the subjects themselves might watch and critique. For the Glass children, the obsession with self-consciousness, in the task of overcoming the entanglements of the ego, constitutes the stories' major dilemma. The Glass children's burden evokes their brilliance.
Seymour Glass, the eldest child of Les and Bessie Glass. He entered Columbia University when he was fifteen years old and by twenty-one is a professor of English; he also is a gifted poet and a mystic who attempts to answer the essential questions of Being. He commits suicide in 1948. This act is at the emotional and spiritual core of “Zooey,” although it occurs seven years before the story takes place. The abiding mystery surrounding Seymour's death is whether his artist's soul is too pure for this world or instead he is a psychotic, shattered victim of the horrors of World War II. The end of Seymour's life—which focuses past and present—is at the tragic center of his siblings' lives.
Bessie Glass, the mother of the seven Glass children. In “Zooey,” realizing that her husband is ineffectual, she tries to help Franny recover from her nervous breakdown.