J.D. Salinger's novel Franny and Zooey shows the redemptive power of family and love in the life of a sister and brother. the plot of the book is simple: Franny, the younger sister of Zooey, has come home unexpectedly from college after suffering a nervous breakdown, and, as a result of her interchanges with Zooey, she finds some measure of peace and acceptance of herself and others. The structure of the book is similarly simple: Franny has a long conversation with her soon-to-be-ex boy friend; Zooey has a long conversation with his and Franny's mother; and Zooey and Franny have a long conversation, which includes a section in which Zooey pretends to be their older and wiser brother Buddy, who is in fact the narrator of the book, or at least the "Zooey" section. Those extended conversations comprise the entire novel, slowly but surely advancing Franny's awakening to a more tolerant and loving religious outlook than the one which possesses her at the beginning of the book.
The theme of the novel is that the spiritual life is not a matter of judging others, as Franny does as she tries to live up to the Biblical call for ceaseless prayer. As other members of the Glass family have done before her, Franny has become influenced by a book called The Way of the Pilgrim. The book is about a pilgrim who travels on foot through Russia looking for the answer to the puzzle of how a person prays without ceasing. Franny explains the story of the pilgrim's quest at length to her shallow beau Lane, who has no interest in and much disdain for the book and its religious emphasis. The pilgrim learns the simple Christian prayer which allows him to pray without stopping, and he teaches the prayer to others on his travels. Of course, the point of the book about the pilgrim is not to learn how to say a prayer for its own sake. Franny says that "Something happens after a while" (37). However, clearly, she does not know what that something is, for she has ...