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Summary
Themes
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
On a cold Saturday morning, Lane Coutell is waiting at the train station with other young men to meet their dates for the Yale game. Lane takes a letter from his pocket and rereads it: it’s from Franny, who effusively expresses love for Lane, praises what he said about Eliot in his last letter, and writes about her enthusiasm for Sappho. In two separate postscripts, Franny also shares that her father’s (Les’s) growth was benign and asks why she sounds “dimwitted” when she writes to Lane.
At first glance, Franny’s letter to Lane may seem like a genuinely affectionate love letter, but on closer look, its oddities cast doubt on the authenticity of her affection for him: she consigns what is probably her largest concern—that her father’s growth isn’t cancerous—to a footnote, as if she doesn’t expect Lane to find it interesting, and she spends the body of the letter mostly showing off her intellectual understanding of poets like the modernist T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and the ancient Greek Sappho (c. 630–570 BCE). Thus, Franny’s “love” letter subtly implies that she and Lane are more comfortable showing off for each other intellectually than discussing their true personal problems.
Themes
The train arrives. Lane’s face remains emotionless, but he throws his arm into the air when Franny descends onto the platform. She waves “extravagantly” back, walks up, and kisses him—awkwardly, as they’re in public. When she asks whether he received her letter, he asks which one. She specifies that she mailed it Wednesday, and he says, “Oh, that one.” When he asks about the little book she’s holding, she answers evasively and shoves the book into her purse.
Lane betrays his enthusiasm for Franny by throwing his arm into the air when he sees her, but he tries to hide the emotions in his face and pretends he doesn’t even remember she sent him the love letter he has actually read repeatedly. This inauthentic behavior suggests either that he is embarrassed by the strength of his authentic feelings or that he wants to keep the upper hand with Franny by pretending to like her less than he really does. By contrast, Franny tries to show enthusiasm for Lane by waving “extravagantly” but ends up giving him an awkward kiss because she’s conscious they’re in public—behavior that suggests she is pretending to like Lane more than she really does. Finally, when Franny dodges Lane’s question about her little book, her evasion hints that the book is something fundamentally different than the canonical authors she and Lane like to discuss in their letters.
Themes
As Lane and Franny walk to the taxi stand, Lane tells Franny that he couldn’t secure her a room in Croft House but that he did get her a “cozy place.” Franny imagines a cramped room that she will be forced to share with strange girls. She expresses fake pleasure while inwardly bemoaning men’s incompetence, recalling one night in New York when Lane let another man take their taxi. Guilty at the trend of her own thoughts, Franny warmly announces that she’s missed Lane—though she hasn’t.
Franny is inwardly annoyed at Lane but guilty about her annoyance, which leads her to overcompensate with inauthentic expressions of affection. The juxtaposition between Franny’s emotional state and her actions illustrates how inauthenticity mars her relationship to Lane.
Themes
Franny and Lane secure a table at Sickler’s, a restaurant popular among pretentious college students. Lane looks smug at being “in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl.” Franny notices his smugness and tries guiltily to listen attentively. Lane jaws on about a writer he claims “lacks testicularity.” He says that he made this argument in a paper and that the professor, a “big Flaubert man” whom Lane expected to dislike it, gave him an A. He says he’d like to read Franny the paper and chatters about his analysis of Flaubert’s “neurotic[]” obsession with choosing the right word—though Lane claims not to go in for Freud.
Lane wants to be “in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl,” a phrase that suggests he dates the attractive Franny for the same reason he chooses a popular restaurant—because other people approve of those choices. Meanwhile, his conversation reveals that he understands Flaubert through a psychoanalytic lens, discussing the writer’s “testicularity” (a pejorative neologism insulting Flaubert’s sexuality and masculinity) and his neuroticism rather than the artistic quality of his work. As Lane is monopolizing the conversation in this conceited way, his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis suggests that the narrative as a whole will portray psychoanalysis as an intellectual fad rather than a true source of wisdom or lens for analyzing beauty.
Themes
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Franny asks whether she can eat the olive in Lane’s martini. Lane responds with irritation, and she realizes she has said the wrong thing. He gives her the olive and she eats it. After a silence, Lane announces that he may try to publish his Flaubert paper, as there haven’t been good critiques of him published recently. Franny tells Lane he sounds like “a section man.” When Lane asks what that’s supposed to mean, Franny—feeling cranky toward Lane while disapproving of her own behavior—defines a section man as someone like the graduate students who take over class when the professors are out and criticize and ruin great writers for the students.
Franny’s outburst shows her internal conflict: she wants to get along with Lane, to secure his affection and approval, but at the same time she believes that the psychoanalytic analysis of literature he is propounding ignores artistic beauty and so ruins great writers for readers. The conflict between Lane and Franny here indicates that while Lane is interested in pursuing status by adhering to intellectual fashions, Franny cares about literature in itself.
Themes
Lane asks what’s gotten into Franny. She apologizes and says she’s been feeling “destructive.” When he points out that her letter didn’t sound destructive, she says it was hard to write. Lane eyes her. Franny promises to “snap out of this” and manages a smile. Lane keeps his face emotionless, refusing to smile back—a choice that may make what’s to come worse.
Franny confesses the inauthenticity of her love letter to Lane and tries to explain her suffering, which has left her feeling “destructive.” Lane does not appreciate or respond to Franny’s honesty—and the narrative seems to imply that his non-response is due to his ego-centric worries about Franny’s affections and his lack of interest in engaging with her personal problems, perhaps because he’s preoccupied with the football game. Moreover, instead of responding to Franny’s honesty with honesty of his own, he hides his feelings and refuses to respond. This interaction suggests that Lane is primarily responsible for the inauthenticity in his relationship with Franny: when she tries to share her authentic feelings with him, he responds badly or doesn’t respond at all.
Themes
Franny tells Lane that if she weren’t so far along, she might have dropped out of the English major or even college because she’s “sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers.” Lane accuses her of over-generalizing. He says that her college has two great poets on faculty, Manlius and Esposito. Franny, pale, protests that Manlius and Esposito aren’t authentic poets—but she tells Lane not to listen to her. Lane refuses to drop the subject until Franny defines an authentic poet. Franny says that poets should create “something beautiful” and Manlius and Esposito don’t.
When Franny says she’s sick of “pedants” and “tearer-downers,” she implies that higher education prioritizes the mere accumulation of knowledge (pedantry) and arrogant critique over genuine understanding of art and literature. Her claim that her poet-professors don’t create “beautiful” work, meanwhile, indicates that Franny believes art and literature ought to be beautiful—a belief that Lane seems not to share.
Themes
When Lane says he thought Franny liked Manlius, Franny says that she does like him but wishes she could respect someone instead. Then, having turned white, she excuses herself and flees to the ladies’ room. After she leaves, Lane sees someone he knows across the room and tries to avoid looking disgruntled, pretending that he’s just bored now that his date’s gone.
Though Franny is visibly distressed, Lane seems more concerned about hiding his relationship problems from other people in the restaurant than about his girlfriend’s suffering—another indication of his ego and social pretensions.
Themes
In the bathroom, Franny locks herself in the remotest stall and weeps violently. Suddenly, she stops, takes the little book from her handbag, hugs it, replaces it, and exits the stall. She washes her face, redoes her makeup, and returns to her table. Lane notes that they’re running out of time and asks whether she’s all right. She claims she is and asks whether he ordered. He says he waited. When she says that she’ll only have a sandwich, Lane orders Franny’s sandwich but snails and frogs’ legs for himself.
Franny’s passionate embrace of the little book in a moment of private distress hints that the book represents something that Franny feels is lacking elsewhere in her life: authenticity or wisdom, perhaps. Meanwhile, her careful redoing of her makeup to hide her previous tears shows that—after Lane rebuffed her first attempt to share her feelings with him—she has retreated to her usual inauthenticity and pretense with him.
Themes
Lane tells Franny that the plan is to go to his friend Wally’s for a drink and drive to the stadium in Wally’s car. When Franny claims not to know Wally, Lane retorts that she’s met him many times. Franny says that she can’t remember everyone, given that everyone talks and acts the same. She knows exactly what boys like Wally will say and do—and girls too. It’s all insignificant and depressing, but rebelling against it is another kind of conformity. Franny admits that she feels she might be going insane.
Franny’s short speech to Lane reveals that social conformity, inauthenticity of the kind she and Lane practice with each other, is harming her mental health—but that she doesn’t know what to do about it because rebellion against conformity is just another inauthentic cliché. In other words, Franny feels that she has no options, no way out of inauthenticity and conformity.
Themes
The waiter brings the food. When he leaves, Lane asks what has happened to Franny. She claims nothing has. Lane asks how her play is going. Franny admits she quit the play—the whole theater department, in fact. When Lane says he thought she adored theater, Franny says acting made her feel like an “egomaniac.” Besides, though she got good roles, the quality of the plays would have made her embarrassed for her brothers to come see her—except her role of “Pegeen in ‘Playboy,’” but the lead actor ruined that play.
Pegeen is a role in The Playboy of the Western World (1907), a play by Irish writer J. M. Synge (1871–1909). The two reasons Franny gives for quitting theater reveal her values: first, she worries that acting encourages egotism, showing her desire to be selfless or at least not selfish; second, she wants to act only in well-written plays, showing her concern with artistic quality and beauty.
Themes
Lane accuses Franny of talking as though she’s the only smart person in the world. He asks her to consider that perhaps the critics who praised the lead actor were right. She insists that the actor was merely talented in a role that requires “genius.” When Lane demands to know whether she thinks she’s a genius, she says that she thinks that she’s going insane and that she’s sick of ego in herself and everyone else. When Lane suggests that a psychoanalyst might say Franny was scared to compete, she insists he has it backwards: she’s afraid she will compete because she’s too cowardly to “be an absolute nobody.”
When Lane asks Franny to consider that the critics were right, not her, he is asking her to give up her artistic judgment and conform to the opinions of those around her. Moreover, when Lane responds to Franny’s criticism of egotism and bad art with psychoanalytic cliches about her fear of competition, it shows he is too bound to fashionable theories of human behavior to attend to what the individual person in front of him is trying to communicate about herself. In both cases, Franny refuses to conform to Lane’s expectations: she insists on the existence and necessity of artistic “genius,” and she explains that she’s not afraid of competition but its opposite, rejecting social approval and pursuing authenticity at the cost of “be[ing] an absolute nobody” in the eyes of others.
Themes
Lane offers Franny his handkerchief in a tone that is compassionate despite “some perverse attempt to make it sound matter-of-fact.” and tells her that she’s sweating. Franny, horrified, refuses to get Lane’s handkerchief dirty but removes things from her handbag onto the table looking for Kleenex. As she blots her face, Lane asks about the little book. Franny puts the book back in her bag and claims she only brought it to read on the train. When Lane asks to see it, Franny ignores him.
Despite his many shortcomings, Lane instinctively shows compassion for the suffering Franny even as he inauthentically tries to seem unmoved by and “matter-of-fact” about her obvious distress. The juxtaposition of Lane’s actual compassion and his feigned indifference suggests that he does genuinely care about Franny but that he is too beholden to social convention and ego to act on that care consistently. Meanwhile, Franny once again dodges Lane’s questions about the little book she brought with her and that she hugged in the bathroom—evasions hinting that the book matters enough to Franny that she is worried about sharing it with Lane, who might not understand it.
Themes
Lane asks whether the little book is a “goddam secret or something.” Franny admits it’s called The Way of a Pilgrim and that she checked it out of the library after her Religion professor mentioned it. An anonymous Russian peasant, a widower with a disabled arm, wrote it. Lane, though paying close attention to his food, keeps asking about the book, so Franny tells him that it’s about the pilgrim figuring out how to “pray incessantly” as it instructs in the Bible. Once a wise man instructs the pilgrim in how to pray incessantly, the pilgrim travels across Russia meeting various characters and teaching them how to pray.
The Way of A Pilgrim is a real Eastern Orthodox spiritual work published in Russian in 1884 and translated into English in 1930. Franny’s evident emotional attachment to the book implies that she has some deep interest in religion and spirituality, while Lane’s inattentiveness—he’s paying attention to his food more than to what Franny is saying—hints that he doesn’t believe religion and spirituality are important.
Themes
As Franny talks, she gets more enthusiastic while Lane gets more focused on his food. After she tells him about a scene from the book she loved, he changes the subject back to his Flaubert paper, mentioning again that he wants to read it to her. Franny agrees that she’d “love” to hear it but suggests that he might like the book and asks whether he wants to hear more about the prayer therein. When he says “sure,” Franny explains that the prayer consists of saying “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” in a rote and automatic way until, somehow, it transforms your spiritual life.
Lane’s increasing inattention to Franny, despite her growing enthusiasm, indicates both his contempt for spirituality and his failure to engage with Franny’s authentic interests. Franny’s letter earlier in the novel illustrated how Franny and Lane bond over showing off intellectually; when Lane changes the subject to his Flaubert paper, he may be trying to get the conversation back onto a topic and style of discussion with which he’s comfortable. Yet Franny is too enthusiastic about her topic to be diverted; her explanation of the Jesus Prayer as a transformative spiritual experience hints that perhaps she wants to use the prayer to escape the trap of social conformity and egotism in which she believes she is stuck.
Themes
Franny is excitedly comparing the automatic prayer in The Way of a Pilgrim to prayer in Nembutsu Buddhism and The Cloud of Unknowing when Lane interrupts, asking whether she “believe[s] that stuff.” Franny says she isn’t making a statement about her beliefs, just pointing out how fascinating it is that sincere people from different religious traditions believe that if you say God’s name “incessantly, something happens.” Lane asks what, exactly, happens and suggests that incessant prayer might harm one’s heart health. Franny insists that incessant prayer simply allows you to see God—even as she disavows knowing what God is or whether God exists.
Nembutsu Buddhism is the Japanese name for Pure Lane Buddhism, a spiritual tradition focused on rebirth, while The Cloud of Unknowing (c. late 1300s) is a Christian mystical work focused on dismantling preconceived ideas or “common knowledge” about God to achieve direct experience or wisdom about God. When Lane dismisses both Eastern and Western mystical traditions as “that stuff,” it shows his contempt for religion in contrast with Franny’s evident hope that religion can somehow provide her with wisdom and do “something” to transform her currently unbearable life, even if she isn’t entirely sure what it will do.
Themes
Lane asks whether Franny wants dessert or coffee. When Franny says no, Lane orders coffee and says he doesn’t think Franny’s religious descriptions include “the most elementary psychology” though religion is obviously a psychological phenomenon. Then he changes the subject by professing his love. Franny asks to be excused again, walks to the bar, and faints.
Lane dismisses every religion, Eastern and Western, as a merely psychological phenomenon, not an independently real source of meaning—thus asserting his conformity to the fashionable intellectual school of psychoanalysis against the highly unfashionable tradition of religious mysticism. Then he proclaims his love of Franny, even though he has just been ignoring her enthusiastic conversation and belittling her interests. The utter inauthenticity of Lane’s “love” profession, given his actual behavior, seems to push Franny over the edge, sending her into a faint.
Themes
Franny regains consciousness on a couch in the restaurant manager’s office. Lane, himself pale, sits beside her. He asks how she’s doing and asks what’s wrong with her given that she sounded “perfect” on the phone the week before. Franny asks whether they’re late for the game. Lane says “the hell with” the game: he’ll take Franny back to her room to rest—and maybe later he can sneak into her room. Franny asks Lane to get her some water. After he leaves, she begins to move her lips without speaking.
Lane believed that Franny was “perfect” on the phone even as she has clearly been in distress for some time; his failure to understand her underscores once again the inauthenticity of their relationship and his inability to grasp what matters to her—despite his worry and care for her, as evidenced by his pallor and his willingness to say “to hell with” the football game. Meanwhile, when Franny begins to move her lips without speaking, it hints that she has started reciting the Jesus Prayer in imitation of The Way of A Pilgrim in an attempt to address her spiritual distress.
Themes
