SOURCE: "The Glass Family," in J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 63-89.

In the following excerpt, Wenke explores the theme of personal identity in Franny and Zooey.

With its sense of heightened expectation in relation to a facile reality, the opening scene of "Franny" evokes the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ivy League undergraduate men wait at a train station for the arrival of their dates. Once the train pulls in, the football weekend—the opponent is Yale—can begin with its rounds of expensive lunches, cocktail parties, postgame receptions, and fancy dinners. It will be a carefully choreographed public exhibition. The college boys cannot wait to perform their parts in the pas de deux, a strained display of confected elegance. Behind his urbane narrator, Salinger directs all his contempt for Ivy League phonies into his mocking depiction of their pseudointellectuality. They...