42 pages • 1 hour read
J. D. SalingerFranny and Zooey
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Pages 3-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Franny”
Part 1, Pages 3-27 Summary
Content Warning: The source material contains depictions of suicide and mental health conditions.
Lane Coutell waits at a train station for his girlfriend Franny Glass to arrive. Lane looks forward to seeing Franny and has much to tell her about college life. Lane takes Franny’s most recent letter out of his pocket and reads it as he waits. In her letter, Franny writes about how excited she is to visit him and how much she loves him. She writes about how her one goal for their weekend together is to focus on having a wonderful time. As the train arrives, Lane puts the letter away, and Franny gets off the train. Lane greets Franny and gets her bags for her. Franny holds a book in one hand, and Lane asks her what she is reading, but she dismisses the question and stuffs the book into her handbag. As Lane and Franny get into a taxi, Lane says they can drop her bags off where she is staying and then go out to lunch. Franny tells him that she missed him, but she realizes as she says it that it isn’t true.
An hour later, Lane and Franny sit at a restaurant together. Lane feels happy that everyone can see him sitting with a beautiful girl at a restaurant. Franny sips her martini and listens to Lane talk about a paper he wrote for his class. Although Lane has talked about the paper for over an hour, he does not notice that Franny has lost interest. He wants to read her the paper over the weekend. Franny tells him that she would love to listen to it, and she tries to change the subject, but Lane continues talking about the paper. Franny interrupts him and asks him if she can have the olive in his martini. Franny’s question upsets Lane because he knows she is not really listening to him. They sit in silence until Lane tells her that his professor thinks he should publish his paper. Franny tells Lane that he is talking like a “section man,” which is a graduate student who takes over for the professor at times. She says that section men always come into a class to talk about their passion and what they want to write their dissertation on, but they talk so much about it that they ruin it for the other students. Franny finds the section men arrogant and dislikes them. Lane gets angry at her for calling him pretentious, and Franny apologizes. Franny tells Lane that she has been acting strangely lately and she does not know why. Lane tells her that she seemed so happy in her letter, so he does not understand why she is acting so aggressively. She explains to him that she wished she had quit college this year, but she keeps going back. She hates the English department because everyone seems to tear other people down. Lane feels insulted by this, since he is studying English. He tells her that she should be grateful because two of the professors in her English program are poets. Franny corrects him, saying that they are not really poets, they just publish poetry and pretend to be poets. Lane asks her what her definition of a “real poet” is, and Franny tells him that real poets must leave behind some beauty in the world, rather than simply getting people to think about things. Franny starts to feel ill, so she goes to the bathroom. Lane sits at the table, thinking that the weekend is going to be horrible if Franny continues acting this way.
Franny sits on the ground in one of the stalls and sobs. After crying for a few minutes, she takes her book out of her bag and hugs it to her chest. After a while, she gets up, washes her face, and goes back out to the table. Lane notices that she has been crying and asks her if her stomach is upset. She tells him that she feels better but does not feel hungry. She decides to order a chicken sandwich and milk, which upsets Lane because he wanted to eat a fancy lunch. Franny tells him that he can order whatever he wants, so he orders frog legs and snails.
After they order, Lane tells Franny that they are meeting his friend Wally Campbell at the stadium after lunch. Franny does not remember Wally, so Lane reminds her about his friend that she has met several times before. Lane feels irritated that Franny does not remember Wally. Now that her memory has been refreshed, Franny starts talking about how she hates people like Wally because of their inauthenticity. Any time she meets a person like Wally, they focus on name-dropping people or gossiping about other people in their circle. She tells Lane that she has met hundreds of “Wally Campbells” in her life and they are all the same. She says that most people just conform to society and have no individuality. However, she feels frustrated because she knows that if a person tries not to conform to society, then they are participating in another type of conformity, by not conforming. Franny suddenly feels dizzy, and Lane asks what is wrong with her. Franny does not respond, so Lane asks her about the play that she is in this semester. She tells him that she quit the play and the entire Theater Department. Franny explains that she felt embarrassed by the lines that she had to say and that everyone in the department had a huge ego. She tells him that she felt embarrassed any time someone came to see her in a play. Lane gets mad at her and asks her why she thinks that she is better than other people. He tells her that the play that she quit got good reviews and he thinks that theater critics have a better perspective on the quality of theater than she does. Lane tells her that the way she talks is arrogant because she thinks she is the only person with a real opinion. Franny explains that she hates people with egos, but Lane accuses her of being afraid of competing with other people. Franny tells him that her competitive nature scares her, which is why she quit the theater department. She fears the type of person that she would become if she allowed herself to truly compete with other people. Lane does not understand what she means, and Franny wonders aloud if she is losing her mind. Lane gives her a handkerchief because sweat has started beading on her forehead. Franny feels embarrassed because she did not realize that she was sweating so much. Franny takes things out of her handbag, because she wants to use a tissue rather than ruin his handkerchief. Lane sees her book on the table and asks her again what she is reading.
Part 1, Pages 3-27 Analysis
In this section, J. D. Salinger explores Franny’s internal struggle through dialogue. Although Franny does not explain to Lane what upsets her, the more he talks about academic achievements and social currency, the more irritated she becomes. Franny’s main internal conflict surrounds her desire to be authentic, as she increasingly sees every possible pursuit or interest as just another form of ego-driven competition. Franny’s sensitive nature contrasts with Lane’s domineering attitude and selfishness. When Lane talks incessantly about the paper he might publish—a paper whose thesis is that French novelist Gustave Flaubert was insufficiently masculine—ignoring the signs that Franny is bored, he reveals an inability to see beyond his own ego and need for validation. This conversation irritates Franny to such a degree that, though she initially tries to feign interest, she ends up insulting him, telling him he sounds like one of the “little section men running around ruining things for people” (15). Section men, she explains, are the self-satisfied graduate students who take over when the professors are absent and whose superficial and arrogant opinions only rob students of their ability to enjoy literature. At this point, Franny’s frustration goes far beyond Lane, and she sees him as an emblem of everything that’s wrong with the academic study of literature. She says, “I’m just so sick of pedants and pathetic little tearer-downers I could scream,” and it’s clear that she means him. The dialogue between Franny and Lane introduces the theme of The Critique of Societal Inauthenticity. Franny’s anger at Lane—and at English departments in general—stems from a belief that people are reading poems and novels not to understand them but only to gain status for themselves. She is beginning to suspect that every pursuit in life operates on this principal, and perhaps especially those, like academia and organized religion, that purport to subscribe to higher values.
Franny’s complaints about Lane’s friend Wally exemplify this theme in another way. To explain her irritation, she notes that she’s been seeing Wally Campbells everywhere throughout her time in college:
I know when they’re going to be charming, I know when they’re going to start telling you some really nasty gossip about some girl that lives in your dorm […] I know when they’re going to pull up a chair and straddle it backward and start bragging […] or name-dropping in a terribly quiet, casual voice (25).
She uses his name in the plural to signify that there are countless people like him in society, people who will pretend that they are more knowledgeable than they are just to get ahead and who love to flaunt their connections and brag about their success. Franny hates the societal drive to conform and achieve milestones, not because it comes at the cost of other people’s success but because it’s inauthentic. People pretend to care about their work or their studies, when really the only thing they care about is status. However, Franny shows both her perceptiveness and her hopelessness when she argues against her own point by noting that even non-conformity is a type of conformity. Franny argument with herself foreshadows the later conflict with Zooey in Zooey: Even though Franny chooses an unconventional and arguably extreme religious path in following The Way of the Pilgrim, she knows that this religious non-conformity is still a type of conformity. Franny hates that she will never escape society’s superficiality, even if she pushes against it, and this fact depresses her and causes her to fall apart.
Salinger critiques the superficiality of society through Lane. Even though Lane claims to love Franny, he is less interested in listening to Franny than in the social currency that will come from being seen “in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl” (11). Although he talks down to Franny, Franny understands his intentions for bringing her to a public place as much as he does. The more Franny realizes that Lane does not care what she has to say, only how she looks and whether she is impressed with him, the angrier she becomes. As the conversation goes on and Franny refuses to fit inside his construction of how a “good” girlfriend should act, Lane reveals his shallowness and self-absorption more and more. Franny removes herself from the table because of Lane’s diminishment of her personhood. Although he notices that she has been crying after she comes back from the bathroom, Lane does not try to figure out why Franny feels upset. Instead, he slips into the misogynistic trope that her stomach must be upsetting her—implying that the unpleasantness is related to her menstrual cycle. Lane does not leave room for Franny to have a personality outside of her womanhood, which is why he becomes increasingly irritated when she does not agree with everything he says. Franny’s intellect intimidates Lane because her questioning and reasoning reveals that she is smarter than he is. For her own part, Franny worries that being smart will not help her, as all it does is make her see the shallowness and falseness in everything she might do. It is for this reason that she recently quit the theater department and is on the verge of quitting the English department as well.
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By J. D. Salinger
