Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

When a child experiences trauma, it stays with them for the rest of their life. When a child experiences abuse, one of the highest forms of trauma, they can do little to stop it from affecting everything they do. Tobias Wolff’s memoir, This Boy’s Life, Illustrates this. While it can be said that Rosemary, the mother of Jack, was in many ways responsible for his life, she herself can not solely be blamed. The trauma and abuse she experienced as a child contributed greatly to her choices, and her son’s life. This shows that adversity in Rosemary’s life lead to her not being able to act normally, and this caused the life of her son.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close stresses the importance of family, and when someone is taken away suddenly, how that can impact one’s views on life and one’s own morality. In addition, the novel emphasizes that people grieve in different ways and at different paces; this is shown through Oskar’s journey and his mother’s friend, Ron. Both characters use those things as ways to deal with the death of Thomas Schell, and both move at different paces. The book also looks into how deception can be an aspect of how people treat others who are grieving; both Oskar and his mother hide things from each other because they both believe it will help the other grieve more easily. Had the two characters not done this, they may not have coped with the death of Thomas the same way. The deception from the two characters when relating to the death of a family member shows how connected the themes of family, morality, and deception are in the novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

For many people, life is about finding a raison d’ȇtre, or a reason to exist. This reason gives meaning to each day and is different for every person. For example, doctors save lives, lawyers seek justice, teachers educate students. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, Oskar, a precocious nine-year-old, finds his own raison d’ȇtre. The story of Oskar Schell is existential; as shown through Oskar’s loneliness, his father’s death, and his attempt to find the lock that his father’s key opens.

Weird. If the relationship between the characters of Grandpa and Grandma could be described in one word, it would be weird. Then again, Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a shining example of everything unconventional, exploring the nuances of grief through multiple and varying perspectives, each with a unique approach that attempts to achieve recovery and solace. The relationship of Grandpa and Grandma is an example of one such attempt at recovery, one that tries desperately to reconcile past traumas, yet ultimately acts as a futile effort that harbors more grief and denial.

Whenever someone experiences a traumatic event, especially at a young age, they tend to experience severe mental challenges including PTSD, and many other symptoms. In most cases such as war and the holocaust “the trauma quite obviously, did not end at liberation” (Bettelheim). Through the use of frightful imagery, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, and Night by Elie Wiesel, express the demand to become impervious to human emotion in order to survive barbaric and savage events.

In both The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, the main protagonists lose an irreplaceable family member. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar Schell’s father, Thomas Schell, is killed as a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Similarly in The Goldfinch, Theo Decker’s mother, Audrey Decker, is also killed as a result of a terrorist attack; this time, in an art museum. While both children are forcibly thrust into analogous situations, Theo and Oskar face their problems and experience their grief in different ways; some of which are more healthy and effective than others.

Jess Walter creates a post 9/11 world that balances precariously between real and surreal. It is real enough that the reader is able to comprehend how awful the attack truly was; but surreal enough that the reader feels the same way most Americans did at Ground Zero—confused, frightened, and grief stricken. Remy, the unwilling hero in all of this is exposed to many different forms of grief both public and personal. Using irony and satire, Walter critiques the way public forms of grief were presented as the only viable ways of grieving after 9/11. Reporters wanted to broadcast each and every loss. The government wanted to exploit the grief of the American people so that they could continue what they were doing in

Throughout the story “Samuel,” Grace Paley uses language to generate a healthy dialogue about the fragility of life by comparing the thoughts and reactions of all the characters in the story leading up to and following Samuel’s tragic death. The text leads the reader through four young boys’ adventures on a train. The story chronicles the thoughts of the passengers on the train in New York City, and their actions leading up to and following the unfortunate death of the main character, Samuel.

The thought of his father being dead is devastating, “The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am’’, (Foer 33) he has to live with the fact that his father is gone. When Oskar exits his house, the suffering starts because he lives to find out the mystery. Once upon a time, he was faced with a similar situation. He describes his life, “The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.” [ Foer 16], Oskar faces many trials that lead to his emotions.

As Peck hears things happening on the news and are described as being tragic, he believes that the word is becoming more and more generic and used when something quite bad happens whether it is tremendously bad or miniscule. Hearing the news and witnessing September 11th happening, Peck has found himself using the word tragedy to describe the event aimlessly. A tragedy is a genre that consists of suffering and sorrow. It eases mourning and creates memory. A tragedy is not meant to commemorate pain but hopes that pain will accelerate and begin to become facilitated. Peck asks the

Foer also shows that they are multifaceted experiences. They can range from the physical (like in the death of those in Dresden) to the emotional (like when Oskar lashes out at his mom and tells her he wishes she had died instead of his father), with varying degrees in between. Finally, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close shows that pain and suffering can be something we overcome and from which we heal. The book doesn’t end with all the broken characters who have endured a tremendous amount of pain and suffering in more of the same. It ends on a more hopeful note, at least in my eyes.

One is letters from Oskar’s grandmother to Oskar telling him about her life and the other is a series of letters written by Oskar’s absent grandfather, Thomas Schell, to his son, Oskar’s father. Thomas explains to his unborn son why he is not going to be there for him growing up. Thomas has lost his first and true love Anna who was the older sister of his later wife and he lost all of his ability to speak. He even talks about his marriage despite him never truly loving his wife. Thomas did greatly care for his wife and often protected her. Thomas gives his wife a typewriter so she can write her life story. When she is finally all caught up with her current life she shows the pages to Thomas who is excited to see what she has written, but instead of seeing words he saw nothing. He remembers that a few years ago he broke the typewriter and she couldn’t see that all the pages were blank. Thomas could have told her the truth and helped her start over but he didn’t want to see her hurt so instead he said “‘Wonderful.’ I told her by rubbing her shoulders in a certain way that we have between us, ‘it’s wonderful.’” (124). Then he offered to help make the story even better so her story may actually be seen

In Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss gives life to The Four Corners of Civilization through his storytelling. Storytelling gives the author an opportunity to show their experiences and reflect their beliefs within the world they are creating. During the time this book was being written, there was the Iraq and Afghanistan War taking place which had been sending many soldiers back home with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Rothfuss parallels this disorder within his book through the main character, Kvothe, when he experiences trauma and he shows how Kvothe copes with the persisting trauma through grief theory, “four doors of the mind” (135) . His four doors of the mind is similar to the Kubler-Ross Model, which is widely accepted by practitioners, but challenges it by believing the mind copes with pain through the central idea of numbing. However, this mindset of categorizing emotions experienced within grief can be destructive behavior towards any griever rather than helping them cope; stages of post-loss grief do not exist.

Rich successfully uses strong images and an extended metaphor to establish a theme that shows that by re-examining a hurtful experience one can experience a rebirth of their

Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) used to play a game with his father, Thomas Schell (Tom Hanks), called “Reconnaissance Expedition”, where his father gave him a map and clues to solve a mission, until September 11th, when Thomas Schell died due to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Thomas intentionally made the game require social interaction with other people because Oskar possesses social anxiety. Directed by Stephan Daldry, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close follows eleven-year-old Oskar as he tries to make sense of things regarding his father’s death and life in general. Oskar finds a key in a small envelope that was hidden inside a vase one day when in his father’s closet and immediately becomes wrapped up in finding the lock to which it belongs because of a belief that this scavenger hunt will lead him to an answer about his dad, or at least closure. On the back of the envelope, the word Black is written, therefore, Oskar borrows phonebooks from the doorman and searches up the addresses of everyone with the last name Black in New York City. Later in his journey, he is accompanied by The Renter (Max von Sydow), who lives with Oskar’s grandma in the same apartment. Despite having an excellent soundtrack and talented camera shots, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close holds a slow-paced plot that essentially would have been an interesting narrative if it was not so dragged on.