Franny and Zooey: Zooey Summary & Analysis

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

“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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.