Point of View

In many ways, Franny and Zooey almost reads like a three-act play, with the majority of the novel made up of conversations between Franny and her boyfriend, and the Glass family. As such, the majority of the novel is told in the first person, with the characters speaking directly to each other. However, because of their intelligence and tendency to ramble on, the conversations by the Glass children fill up pages and pages. In fact, the second section, Zooey, is almost all conversation, with only a few pages devoted to third-person narration.

Salinger changes things up a bit by writing the Zooey section as if it were a short story written by Buddy Glass, the oldest living Glass child. It's Buddy who provides the section's introduction, and in some ways epilogue, by talking directly to the reader in second-person voice. It's a peculiar device, but it...