This is actually another paper I’d written for school, but it is about the book I stumbled across this year which blew my mind in ways that a book hadn’t blown my mind in a good long time. For anyone interested in new and progressive devolpments in literature.. this is a must read.
If you were to judge the book by its cover, or even by the little summary that is to be found on the inside jacket flap, there isn’t much to recommend Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. This is a story of how humans respond to tragedy, pretty cut and dried. However, opening this book is so much more that simply reading a story. Through a number of devices, both literary and visual, Jonathan Safran Foer manages to bring you intimately into the story he’s creating while at the same time reminding you that it’s just a book.
Title: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
LC Rating:
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, (ELIC) tells the story of Oskar Schell; he’s nine years old and has lost his father to the events of September 11th. Through the course of the book Oskar finds a key inside an envelope in a vase hidden on the top shelf of his father’s closet and embarks on a quest to discover what the key opens. In the background of Oskar’s story we learn about his paternal grandparents’ relationship, and that’s pretty much it. Oskar tells the bulk of the story himself, he narrates nine chapters, and the grandparents take four each.
Each individual narrative voice is presented in a very different style, not just in terms of the language of the prose, but also the physical appearance of the pages. In a number of places the appearance of the book itself plays a principle role in understanding the plot.
With a definite debt owned to Faulkner two of the narrators contradict each other, and that contrast deepens our understanding of each. The beauty of this technique is that it allows vital information to leak out slowly, and as the different narrators tell their stories, the meaning of an event changes, and deepens.
ELIC’s text also repeats several phrases and ideas; these themes are explored by the different characters from their unique perspectives, and certain imagery keeps emerging, most of it incredibly poignant. The ones that really stand out are the importance of the written word, especially in the form of letters from loved ones, and the idea that accumulated paper helps things burn faster and brighter in the midst of disaster. ELIC runs on the tension generated by the interaction of those ideas, the importance of accumulating tangible records of our human interactions and the danger inherent in clinging to these things.
The plot and appearance of ELIC lends itself very easily to the interpretation that it has been put together by Oskar Schell, our primary narrator. ELIC is Oskar’s accumulated records, this is what he’s put together to explain what he’s learned from his tragedy. This is what you physically hold in your hands as you read. At first this would seem to contradict the very idea of good writing, where the point is to draw the reader in so deeply that they forget they are holding a book, and while at certain points you do simply have to stop reading and view the thing as more of an artifact, Foer uses this feeling of dislocation to great effect. It forces you to consider the fact that it’s fiction and that makes it easier to go to sometimes extreme lengths with the characters, and symbolically underline a few of the book’s key points.
On top of the fairly conventional narrative structure of a memoir, Oskar’s contributions to ELIC are the ones that really make it appear to be his scrap-book. Included are photos that he mentions taking, sheets of scribbles from an art-supply store that he mentions gathering into his possessions, and images he’s downloaded from the internet.
The first example appears on page 10 where there is an article reproduced on the page and a phrase is circled in red. It fits seamlessly into the story because Oskar is describing his father’s habit of circling mistakes in the New York Times with a red marker. It works on even more levels, because the particular instance cited is a clue in a game Oskar and his father are playing, where he is on what could best be called a treasure hunt. The circled phrase is “not stop looking” and this speaks volumes when taken against the main plot thrust of Oskar hunting around New York in search of the lock that his father’s key will open. The other significant meaning from this first oddity is that it will help you understand the very distracting art in Chapter 10. Of course you have to be paying close attention; I missed it the first time around.
Grandma’s four chapters are, along with one of Oskar’s, the only sections of the book where there is not some example of what I can only call art. Grandma provides just text. Her sections are different pieces of one letter written to Oskar the day after the events of the book’s climax. Grandma; whose first name we never learn, but whose maiden name we do, provides the best explanation for the story of her and Oskar’s grandfather. Their relationship is recounted from both sides, and while grandma sometimes makes more sense, she’s also writing her letter forty years after the first of grandpa’s memories were penned.
The chapters narrated by Thomas Schell, grandpa, are presented as letters to his son, Oskar’s father; letters that he claims he will never send, and one letter that he wrote even after he knew that his son was dead. Of course when his story starts we have no idea that this is Oskar’s grandfather. Oskar doesn’t know his grandfather. Thomas is a sculptor who lost his ability to speak soon after arriving in America. The symbolism inherent in all of his sections is unmistakable. He loses his ability to speak, not through physical misfortune, but rather one word at a time. The first word to go is a name, Anna, followed by the word ‘and’ “probably because it was so close to her name” (16). Eventually we will learn that Anna died in the firebombing of Dresden, an event that Thomas survived.
The majority of significant art in the book is to be found in grandpa’s sections. Since he has lost his ability to speak, grandpa takes to carrying around empty books that he calls his daybooks and using the pages to write communications to the outside world. Writing becomes his speech, and pages 19-27 all have only a single phrase placed directly in the center of them. On page 17 he reveals that he is writing into one of these books, and we are reading his narrative directly from the daybook, being interrupted as he goes about his daily life. This will become even clearer in chapter six where his narrative alternates between recollections about the two loves of his life, separated by pages with a single phrase where he enquires about the time, and where to find tickets, apparently being distracted from his narrative or moving from one location to another before settling back down to write again.
Another significant feature of grandpa’s sections are the doorknob photographs. There are five of them in the book, each of grandpa’s chapters has one, and Chapter six has two. They appear on pages 29, 115, 134, 212 and 265, none of them are the same. When the first three doorknob photos appear they are completely random, nothing in the text helps you to understand why it is that you are suddenly staring at a photograph of a doorknob. It isn’t until Chapter eight that grandma finally explains that grandfather took pictures of all sorts of stuff in their apartment, especially the doorknobs and used to tape the pictures into his daybooks. (175) This revelation makes us feel somewhat relieved that there is perhaps method to the madness, but at the same time we have now been subjected to three doorknob photographs, and this can’t be all.
Chapter ten of ELIC is very hard to read. It’s hard to read for a number of reasons, the first and primary reason is because there are literally hundreds of red circles all over the pages. Misplaced commas, spelling errors and certain phrases are all circled in red. It looks like this-
This is almost unbearably distracting, it’s very hard to keep your eyes from skipping around the page from red circle to red circle, and as the chapter progresses the red circles get more and more prevalent. Thankfully it’s a short chapter, and on page 212 we get to look at a photo of a doorknob. The chapter is also tough to read because its grandpa’s first-hand account of the bombing of Dresden and the events he is relating are horrific. All this red on the page does a number of things. The first thing is does is it slows you down and forces you to pay attention in order to even think of reading for comprehension. The other thing it does, is provide an emotional buffer from the horror that the narrator is relating, we’re so distracted by these red marks all over the page that it prevents the graphic tragedy from being that affecting.
There are two other highly significant features of Chapter 10, and they are that this is where we finally get a good explanation for the doorknobs, and much is revealed about grandpa’s character when we learn who owns the red pen that did this. On page 211 grandpa relates the story of burning both his hands badly on a doorknob as he disobeys his father and flees his home to find his sweetheart. The next page is a picture of a doorknob. The thing that makes this especially significant is that grandma makes repeated references to loving the roughness of grandfather’s hands, something she explains as his being a sculptor, now we know better, and it makes those references quite poignant. And since we know that grandma made much out of his hand’s roughness it was bound to keep bringing the memory up in grandpa’s mind, and since we know him to be a self-torturing man, it makes sense that he would carry around pictures of doorknobs to keep the pain fresh.
The red pen that desecrated Chapter 10 belongs to Oskar’s father. Readers who don’t quite make the connection from page 10 will have to wait until grandma’s last chapter when this is made perfectly clear. Despite his claims that he never sent any letters, grandpa sent one, and it was this one. When you compare this letter to the other’s he’d written, his choice in sending this letter speaks volumes about grandpa’s character, namely that he’s a self-pitying fool who wallows in his own misery. My initial reaction to Chapter 10 (made without understanding who had made the red marks) was that these marks were symbolic of a central theme, namely that we as humans are judged on how well we respond to the tragedies that inevitably befall us. I think this still stands, out of all the characters grandpa has dealt with tragedy the worst, and is judged accordingly.
Grandpa’s final chapter is written the night the book’s climax takes place, when through a series of events too complex to quickly explain, he has finally met Oskar. As this chapter progresses the type slowly gets closer and closer together, mirroring his repeated statements that he is running out of room and time, and wishing that he had an infinitely long book. The last three pages of this chapter are illegible, as he begins running his words together until they are on top of each other. Grandpa has finally decided that he needs to participate in life again and in his zeal to express himself stops being able to. This is an example, taken from right before the text degenerates into complete illegibility-
From the narratives of both grand-parents we know that Oskar would have access to his grandfather’s notebooks, which would be why they are here. Since the grandmother’s narrative is a letter addressed to Oskar, it makes sense that he would have that as well.
ELIC is Oskar Schell, making his statement about overcoming tragedy. And a fair amount of it has to do with revising history, or at least focusing on specific aspects of it. The two principle characters we have to contrast are Oskar and his grandfather, both have been through tragedies. Grandma has also seen her share of tragedy, but she’s relating the events from hindsight and expresses primarily remorse at the things she didn’t do when she had the chance. Grandpa has allowed a tragedy to shut him out of life, it’s what makes him silent. He describes his thinking as a wedge between himself and happiness, “the curse of never letting go” (17). He’s hoarding his pain, posting pictures of doorknobs in the notebooks he carries to remind him of his pain.
Oskar, with his gift of hindsight, has put together this scrap-book. At the end he indulges for a moment in his grandmother’s sense of remorse, and dreams of running the events of Sept. 11th backwards, but for most part Oskar’s book has been put together in a more positive theme. For example, Oskar mentions a scrapbook called ‘stuff that happened to me’ a number of times. In the text it is a collection of primarily horrible images he’s downloaded from the internet, but when the 14 pages of photos come along the only one that could be described as horrible is the image of a man falling from the world trade center.
Oskar has decided to put his grandfather’s habit of self-punishment aside. The inclusion of the image of the man falling is necessary because this is the one image out of the many he’s seen that most resembles his father, and what he wanted was to know exactly how he died so that he could stop torturing himself with the things his imagination shows him.
At the end of the book, after participating in a cathartic even with his grandfather, Oskar takes a series of images from the man’s fall and reverses their order, choosing instead to see the man as going up, not falling. The last 15 pages of the book will work like a flip-book, you scan them fast enough, and you watch the man ascend off the page.
This is perhaps the only thing that struck me as weak about the book. The conclusions that Oskar comes to are beautiful and well articulated within the plot, I found it unnecessary to resort at the very end to this particular device. That said I will admit that watching a man flying upwards along the world trade center is a very unsettling experience, and after reflecting on the book in it’s entirety it does make for an effective, if somewhat weak, ending.
The ending however is evidence of the precedence of art in the book as a whole, perhaps a weak ending was considered somewhat acceptable since it allowed for that last visual sensation which is quite remarkable. I have only touched on the symbolism that runs throughout the novel, but just the art alone makes Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close stand out as more than just another book, but a reading experience that is not soon forgotten.