Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
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| Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close | |
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| Author | Jonathan Safran Foer |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Publication date | 4 April 2005 (1st edition) |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 368 pp (hardback edition) & 368 pp (paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-618-32970-6 (hardback edition) ISBN 0-618-71165-1 (paperback edition) |
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a 2005 novel by New York writer Jonathan Safran Foer. It was one of the first novels to deal with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book is an example of an emerging school of contemporary post-modernism which challenges the technical limitations of the novel to create a more immersive work. Foer, like his friend and sometime collaborator Dave Eggers, is often called a product of the information age. He brings a multimedia sensibility to this book. He uses type settings, spaces and even blank pages to give the book a visual dimension beyond the prose narrative. The photographs one narrator takes appear in the book as if inserted into a diary, and in the visual trick that made this book famous, Foer makes a flip book in the final pages out of photographer Lyle Owerko's shot of the Falling Man, making the man who had jumped from the burning World Trade Center appear as though he is falling up. The book's narrator is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. Two years before the story begins, Oskar loses his father on 9/11. In the story, Oskar discovers a key in a vase that belonged to his father. Oskar's last statement in the book, after having described what would have happened if the day of 9/11 could be reversed, is, "We would have been safe." The main character shares many stylistic similarities (and first name) with Oskar Matzerath from Gunter Grass' "the Tin Drum," most notably his constant carrying of a tambourine in place of Grass' drum.
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[edit] Narration
Through an idealistic and naive child, Foer uses first-person narration to tell this story. An unreliable narrator of this sort may omit crucial details the reader might need. Foer takes a common tack on this problem by making Oskar uncommonly precocious. However, Oskar is not a literary prodigy created to tell a story. Rather he is over-educated, and over-sensitive. It is also entirely possible Oskar is merely eccentric and views life differently. As a child of Manhattan progressives, he is vegan, musical (he plays the tambourine), pacifist, multilingual, academic, and above all, earnest. He, therefore, provides an array of filters through which the reader views even the most tragic events.
Foer also uses two other narrators in a parallel story. The narrators are Oskar's paternal grandparents who tell the story of their childhood, courtship, marriage, and separation before the birth of Oskar's father. These narrators are even more vague than Oskar. Indeed, Oskar's grandfather is so grief-stricken that he becomes mute. His grandmother is briefly suicidal . Much of these characters' stories is told through the letters they have written, some of which are addressed to Oskar and others to Oskar's father.
Their devastation, like Oskar's, arises from a single horrible event: the United States Air Force and Royal Air Force bombing of Dresden, their home in Germany, in World War II. In their old age, they have reconciled themselves to one hope: that their tragedy will fade and the lives of their son and grandson will be happy.
[edit] Pictures in the story
Throughout the novel, Foer uses images as a recurrent literary technique. These images connect to singular ideas and themes, as well as emotions and perspectives alluded to on earlier pages. Oskar visits a woman and sees a picture of an elephant's eye. The reader views this image with Oskar on the adjacent page. At one point, while out hunting for his father's clues in a game, Oskar searches through a test pad for pens while in a store. The pages of the pad are inserted into the novel, giving readers a sense that they are actually seeing through Oskar's eyes as they flip through the random signatures. The reader is temporarily placed in the role of Oskar numerous other times throughout the novel by the use of these types of simple, everyday images. These images work to further connect the reader to a narrative that at times seems ambiguous, confusing, and disconnected. For example, in the novel, Oskar suffers feelings of hatred and confusion because of his mother's "new friend," and is shown as having bruises from beating himself up.
The last fifteen pages of Foer's text comprise a flip-book collection of images of a man falling upwards toward the top of the World Trade Center. The protagonist, Oskar Schell, identifies the falling man as possibly being his father who died on September 11th. At the end of the book, Oskar imagines his father's last actions before he may have jumped from the North Tower back to the night before September 11th when he tucked Oskar into bed. On page 325, Foer writes in the words of Oskar, now a ten-year-old boy, "...I found the pictures of the falling body. I ripped the pages out of the book. I reversed the order, so the last one was first, and the first was last. When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky." Jonathan Foer was not the first to describe the falling man as "floating"; however, he was the first to show the image in such a manner. The falling man is his last photograph and, although controversial, connects a fictional story to a true event.
[edit] A connection between September 11 and the key
This is one of the first American works of fiction to incorporate the attacks of September 11, 2001, as a pivotal theme in its plot. The use of reality is a very crucial aspect that affects all elements of the novel. Another important theme stressed in the novel, which seems to correlate with the theme of the attacks, is the key that Oskar finds in an envelope in a vase that he accidentally knocked over. The key causes him to embark on a hunt for a solution to a great mystery—a kind of detective story that involves an answering machine containing tape recordings of calls made on the morning of the "worst day," which was hidden in a closet. The key symbolizes Oskar's search for why and what exactly happened to his father.
[edit] Similarities to Foer's first novel
There are some similarities between this novel and Foer's first one, Everything Is Illuminated. Both of the stories are told from three different points of view which are not all in the same timeline. In the beginning of the novel, it is difficult to see how these different story lines will merge in the end. A large role is given to the paternal grandfathers who are in both novels curious characters who cannot exist outside of the novel. The main characters' quests in the books is to find out something about some deceased family member, and both times it is these quests that are the start of the story. However, the discoveries that are made are most unexpected and disappointing to the characters who are looking for something that they think is important about their family members' pasts. Both back stories are somehow related to the Second World War: In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the bombing of Dresden is vitally important to the main character's grandparents; in Everything Is Illuminated, it is the grandfather's flight from a Jewish shtetl in Ukraine before the Nazis arrive that is important.
[edit] Adaptations
A one-night engagement of a Literature to Life production based on the novel by special arrangement with The American Place Theatre was presented and hosted by Baylor University Theatre in Waco, Texas on September 15, 2006. The script of the one-actor production was taken directly from the text of Foer's novel. The production starred theatrical and film actress Haley March, a 2000 alumna of Baylor University. Wynn Handman adapted and directed the production. The production was preceded by a fifteen-minute pre-show discussion and followed by a fifteen-minute post-show discussion.
