The Call





Franny Glass, a college student majoring in English, receives "the call" while visiting her boyfriend. Franny senses that there is something lacking in her life, and she feels obligated to find out what is missing. Franny is bothered by the fact that she has, up till now, been willing to live by the standards and values of other people, and is terrified that she will continue to do so. Her struggle is to be honest with herself and others, yet become at peace with herself in relation to the rest of the world. First, she tries to dismiss her feelings as the result of a bad day, and asks her boyfriend, Lane, several times to excuse her hostile behavior. She expresses her concern about her constant feeling of 'destructiveness', as she puts it. What bothers her the most is her inability to communicate, actually communicate and make sense to Lane without coming across as a pompous English-majoring nineteen year old.

Franny had recently read a book before she visited Lane titled "The Way of A Pilgrim", about a peasant who wants to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you should pray incessantly. He journeys all over Russia looking for someone who can tell him how to pray incessantly. He meets a 'starets' who shows him how. The starets tells him about the Jesus Prayer, which is 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.' The starets tells him that if he keeps saying the prayer over and over again, the prayer eventually becomes self-active, and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats, and that is praying without ceasing. After the peasant has perfected his prayer, he goes all over Russia meeting people, and teaching them how to make this prayer.

To Franny, it seems that the purpose of the prayer is to "purify your outlook and and get an absolutely new conception of what everthing's about." This is what Franny wants, and what she is after. The peasant's journey for biblical understanding in the eighteen hundred's is Franny's journey at present. After she excuses herself to the bathroom for about the third time while she and Lane are out to lunch, Franny collapses along the way. When she wakes up, she is murmuring the Jesus Prayer under her breath, hoping for some mystical change to happen in her life, as if it would justify all the 'ego' that surrounds her.                                 

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