SOURCE: "J. D. Salinger and the Quest for Sainthood," in Four Spiritual Crises in Mid-Century American Fiction, University of Florida Press, 1963, pp. 36-43.

In the following excerpt, Detweiler analyzes the spiritual crisis at the heart of Franny and Zooey.

A study dealing with the individual religious experience cannot ignore that most discussed of crises in recent American fiction, namely, Franny Glass's slightly suspect nervous breakdown in Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Salinger even more than [Philip] Roth appears fascinated by the individual crisis and particularly by the crisis that has religious origin or result. Holden Caulfield's trouble in The Catcher in the Rye has been given theological interpretation, in later stories we learn that the suicide of Seymour Glass ("A Perfect Day for Bananafish") had religious connotations, as did the quasi-breakdown of Sergeant X in "For Esme—with Love and Squalor." . . .

Salinger cannot be interpreted in terms of a...