Franny and Zooey

Zooey Glass is Franny’s brother and the protagonist of the novella Zooey. Twenty-five years old, Zooey is tall, thin, and extremely smart. Rather than pursuing academia like his brothers, he has become an actor. Since they are so close in age, Zooey and Franny have had similar upbringings, as their much older brothers, Seymour and Buddy, taught them about topics that they thought were more important than what they learned in school. Seymour passed on his fascination with religion to Franny and Zooey, and while Franny took to it, Zooey rejected and hated it. Zooey is bitter and angry and has difficulty relating to people around him because of his anger toward Seymour over his suicide.

Zooey’s destructive attitude comes from his inability to be authentic with his own feelings. Zooey does not allow himself to grieve for Seymour because he does not want to experience sadness. Instead, Zooey decides to focus on anger and aggression to avoid the reality of his grief. Zooey recognizes his destructive behavior, which he believes prevents him from being happy and engaging in meaningful relationships. Zooey’s tendency to become tunnel-visioned is the reason he rants at Franny and does not realize how his actions affect him. Although Zooey cares for his family, he does not know how to express this love, which is why he resorts to pretending to be Buddy when he talks to Franny on the phone. This also reveals why Zooey decided to become an actor, rather than an academic, because he can relate to and express other people’s emotions more easily than his own. Although Zooey criticizes Franny’s spirituality, Franny’s dialogue reveals that Zooey enjoys religion more than he lets on at first. However, Zooey reveals his hypocrisy in criticizing Franny, because, while he believes in his own supernatural experiences, he refuses to believe in her spirituality. However, Zooey reveals how he cares for Franny in the closing conversation, when he tells Franny about Seymour’s concept of the “Fat Lady”—an imaginary person who sees what no one else sees and who, Zooey says, is really Jesus. Zooey becomes emotional remembering Seymour in this way, which is why he quickly gets off the phone with Franny. Although Zooey does not necessarily learn to be more empathetic by the end of the novella, he chooses to put Franny’s needs before his own and shares a precious memory of the brother he misses.

Bessie Glass is Zooey and Franny’s mother. Bessie’s frantic nature causes Zooey to become frustrated with her, but she only wants her children to be safe and happy. Bessie feels distraught over Franny’s refusal to eat and continually offers her daughter chicken soup as if that will solve all her problems.

Bessie requests Zooey’s help in speaking with Franny because she believes that her children can speak to each other about personal issues in a way that she cannot. Bessie’s lack of boundaries in her children’s personal space, such as bursting in on Zooey when he is taking a bath, stems from her trauma over losing Seymour to suicide and Walt to the war. Zooey characterizes his mother’s worry over Franny as oversolicitous and excessive, but Bessie knows from Seymour’s suicide how quickly a person can choose to decide to harm themselves. Bessie desperately wants another person to take over the responsibility of helping Franny so that she does not need to bear the weight of it alone. Since her husband Les is emotionally unavailable, living in the past to process his grief, Bessie feels responsible for holding the family together and keeping her surviving children safe. Bessie does not allow herself to feel or process Seymour’s death, because she knows that the family unit would fall apart without her. However, Bessie allows Zooey to see a glimpse of her grief when she tells him that she does not go into Seymour’s room anymore. Bessie experiences the deep maternal grief of losing her children, but her grief over Seymour’s death is the most painful for her because he was her favorite child. The added pain of knowing that Seymour’s PTSD from the war was a main factor in his depression only furthers Bessie’s guilt over the possibility that she could have done something to help her son. However, Bessie feels haunted by the question of why her children are so unhappy. She tells Zooey that she does not think his intellect is a gift if it does not make him happy. Although Zooey does not have a retort to this observation immediately, he carries it on into the next conversation with Franny because he tells Franny that there are good things in the world, they just have a hard time remembering to be happy.