Study Guide to Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by J.D. Salinger, a prominent contender for the National Book Awards. Titles in this study guide include Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey. As an author of the twentieth-century, he is best known for his novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Moreover, his novels were written in private, as he was reclusive. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of J.D. Salinger classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO J. D. SALINGER

 

J. D. Salinger (Jerome David Salinger) was born in New York City in 1919 to Sol and Miriam Jillich Salinger (his father was Jewish; his mother, Scotch Irish). He has a sister Doris 8 years his senior. He attended public schools on Manhattan’s upper West Side, the private McBurney School in Manhattan, and then Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1936. His college experience was brief: a summer session at New York University, a short-story writing class at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, co-editor of Story, and a short period at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.

Uninterested in joining his father’s meat importing business, he was writing fiction at least by the time he was twenty (his first published story is dated 1940). Of further biographical note is his military service during World War II, including counter-intelligence training in Devonshire, England (the setting for part of “For Esme-with Love and Squalor”); he also participated in D-Day beach landings and European campaigns. During the post-war period he has lived, in addition to New York, in Tarry-town, N.Y.; Westport, Conn. and Cornish, N.H.

In 1955 he married Claire Douglas; they have a daughter and a son.

Salinger is noted for what has been called a “reverse exhibitionism,” that is, a determination to keep his life private. If he is a recluse, however it seems to have become so by a more gradual process than is usually pointed out (he was, after all, in this teen years, an active student at Valley Forge prep school, participating in several clubs, the dramatic organization, and in the preparation of the academy yearbook as literary editor). Withdrawal may have been the result of disenchantment perhaps with the irritant, nuisance element success can bring, as well as a general seeking after a peaceful existence which was not uncommon to young men who survived the grim years of actual involvement in World War II. In 1950, for example, he was not above visiting (while living at Tarrytown, N. Y.) a short-story class at Sarah Lawrence College, although he remarked afterwards, “I enjoyed the day, but it isn’t something I’d ever want to do again.” Since then he has turned down invitations for public appearances (such as participation in the various writers’ conferences which are run regularly in the United States and abroad).

In Cornish, N. H., where he has lived since the fervor of publicity over The Catcher in the Rye, he seems to have stressed in “nuisance values” of success, by putting a high fence around his house. Since this is the case, it seems a wise policy to follow the lead of one of Salinger’s more scrupulous critics (Warren French) who admits in the preface to his book about the author (J. D. Salinger): “I bear no news about Salinger himself-I would consider it impertinent to invade his cherished privacy.”

BACKGROUND AND PUBLICATION OF NINE STORIES

By 1941, when he was 22, Salinger was publishing in well-paying magazines such as Collier’s and Esquire, and he continued to write during World War II. But it was in 1948 that he began to find real recognition, with the publication of three stories which later were to appear in the collection, Nine Stories: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” all appearing in the New Yorker, certainly a prestigious sign. In 1949 and 1950 three more stories from his collection were published - “The Laughing Man,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “For Esme -with Love and Squalor.” The collection itself, of course, was not issued until 1953, since when it has enjoyed lasting popularity without ever reaching the top-selling levels. (The story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” titled My Foolish Heart, was turned into a movie by Samuel Goldwyn studios with Susan Hayward and Dana Andrews. It was a distorted version which Salinger disapproved of highly, a factor which has probably contributed to urge his continuing refusal to allow further screen or television productions of his writings.)

BACKGROUND AND PUBLICATION OF CATCHER IN THE RYE

In the late ’40s and early ’50s, while the pieces from Nine Stories were being published separately, Salinger was undoubtedly trying to work into a novel his earlier stories about Holden Caulfield. (In 1946, for instance, a novelette about Holden had been accepted for publication, then was withdrawn by Salinger). The Catcher in the Rye became upon publication in 1951 what might be termed an almost-immediate success. As a midsummer Book-of-the-Month Club selection, for example, it certainly exposed Salinger to a larger audience than he had hitherto enjoyed-if, indeed, “enjoyed” is the proper word, since the degree of popularity was enough to disturb Salinger, who directed that a large photograph of his face be removed from the third and subsequent issuings of the book. He remarked later to a friend that “I feel tremendously relieved that the season for success for The Catcher in the Rye is nearly over. I enjoyed a small part of it, but most of it I found hectic and professionally and personally demoralizing.” Reviews of the novel were mixed, from out-and-out approval to questions about Salinger’s attitudes, the colloquial style, the focus on an adolescent boy, and, of course, the issue which has since attracted attention-whether the book was fit for young readers. Thus The Catcher in the Rye, especially since issuance as a paperback in 1953, has been, curiously, both stipulated for and banned from high school and college reading lists (the foundation for, or lack of foundation for, such controversy is explored in the following pages of detailed analysis of the novel).

LIST OF SALINGER’S WORKS

The Catcher in the Rye, 1951; Nine Stories, 1953; Franny and Zooey, 1961; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, 1963. (As indicated above, all subsequent works listed after The Catcher in the Rye are short stories, most of them published prior to collective issuance.)

A BRIEF LOOK AT SALINGER’S THEMES AND ATTITUDES

Following are some of the issues pertinent to any detailed analysis of Salinger’s work, issues which are treated in the “Comments” below as well as in the short summary of what Salinger’s critics have had to say about his writings: (a) His protagonists are often intelligent, sensitive, and very aware adolescents, or adults who, in either case, seek their own identity in relation to an external world with which they find themselves more or less at variance. (b) Alienation or disenchantment with the so-called “adult” world figures largely in Salinger’s writings, often emphasized by rather “average” characters (parents, teachers, marriage partners, etc.) who interrelate with the troubled protagonist. (c) A definition of the “adult” world is sometimes sought or offered-it may be viewed as commercialized, materialistic, phony, ugly, grotesque-all suggestive of reasons for the sensitive protagonist to retreat from it, in reality or symbolically (for example, through madness, or suicide, or simply by introversion and fantasy). (d) Salinger is very concerned with the rather ancient question of innocence and experience in human lives, and how the life experience which is inevitable may best be realized instrue spiritual growth, instead of producing, say, a tough cynicism (such as that of Eloise in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” or of young Selena and Eric in “Before the War with the Eskimos”). (e) Sometimes true “love” of humanity seems to be the solution offered, as in “Teddy”. (f) Salinger’s style includes a rather inspired use of detail - he can characterize in an instant’s phrase - and a good deal of 20th-century slang, vocabulary of adolescents, colloquialisms.

NINE STORIES

“A PERFECT DAY FOR BANANAFISH”

This introductory story of the collection treats the now famous Glass and Carpenter families of Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction. The extremely precocious and sensitive children of the Glass family include Seymour (featured in this story); Buddy (a writer); Boo Boo (featured in “Down at the Dinghy” in this collection); the twins, Walt and Waker (Walt is deceased, Waker is a Roman Catholic priest); Zooey, an actor, and Franny, a college student (featured in Franny and Zooey). Mr. Glass is Jew...