SOURCE: Sharma, Som P. Ranchan. “Echoes of the Gita in Salinger's Franny and Zooey.” In The Gita in World Literature, edited by C. D. Verma, pp. 214-19. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers, 1990.

In the following essay, Sharma finds references to the Hindu sacred text Bhagavad Gita in Salinger's Franny and Zooey.

In the mid-fifties, throughout the sixties, and even the early part of the seventies, J. D. Salinger was enormously popular. Although his popularity stemmed from his Nine Stories and The Catcher in the Rye, it was also due to his saga of the Glass family which he had created, beginning with “Franny” (1955) and “Zooey” (1957), “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955), “Seymour—An Introduction” (1959), and “Hapworth” [“Hapworth 16, 1924”] (1965). The narrator of these three slim novels and an epistolary long short story, “Hapworth,” is Buddy, the second brother in the Glass family comprising parents, Les and Bessie, the eldest son...