Franny And Zooey Summary

The main character in the opening paragraph, Franny, is immediately described as looking at a widely insignificant object: a couch. Salinger establishes the setting as an apartment or home, allowing the reader to contextualize the subsequent events through descriptions of everyday objects such as “a coffee table,” “pillows,” and a “hall” (4,5). This familiar environment supports the assertion that setting is the principal device used in this extract from Franny and Zooey. The third-person-omniscient narrator not only leaves the character’s internal conflict open to interpretation, but the point of view also adds to the chronological narrative style of Franny and Zooey; the author is quite literally telling a story about Franny’s “journey” to her parents’ bedroom to answer the phone. In the excerpt from Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger uses the passage of time, characterization of Franny, and imagery to evoke the main character’s …show more content…
The setting itself, an apartment or home, is bolstered by numerous images of “long halls” and “freshly painted walls” (10,15). The setting and imagery offers a deliberate tone, describing Franny’s preference to “take the longish walk down the hall to her parents’ bedroom” where she would observe the “smell of fresh paint, plus the newspapers underfoot”(5-6,11). The setting is obviously a confined space, metaphorically parallel to Franny’s thoughts: cluttered and multifarious. The images of the freshly-painted bedroom with “furniture…herded into the middle of the room and covered with canvas” allude to new beginnings, possibly for the whole Glass family, who are going through a transformative period as evidenced by Franny’s hesitance to talk to her own brother (16). The bare room that she walks into is what she thinks of as “ideal”: a fresh start with no