Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close Analysis

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Courtney Miller ENGL 101W D10 Professor Brook October 8, 2014 Displaced Connections in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer is overall a tale of connections and how people interact with each other. However, the concrete connections in the novel are not the intriguing part; the missed connections are. Abby Black’s phone call to Oskar after their visit, Thomas Schell Jr.’s missed phone calls to Oskar on 9/11, and Thomas Schell Sr.’s return to the U.S.A. only a few days before his son died all mirror real life and the intricate relationships human beings have. A main plot of the novel is the fact that after Thomas Schell Jr., Oskar’s dad, dies in 9/11, Oskar finds a key in a vase in his father’s closet. The key is in an envelope labeled “Black” and so Oskar decides to visit every Black in the phone book. A woman named Abby is the second Black he comes across and she is married to William. When Oskar arrives, the couple is fighting. During their visit, she says, “I’m sorry I don’t know anything about the key.” (Foer 97). However, Oskar learns at the end of the book…show more content…
The book would have been much shorter if Oskar had simply picked up the phone when Abby called, or if he had picked up the phone when his father called him on 9/11. In addition, if Thomas Schell Sr. had arrived in the U.S.A. earlier and, consequently, had gone to see his family sooner, perhaps the death of Thomas Schell Jr. could have been prevented entirely. Unfortunately, that is not how the book was written. The missed connections are important because they bring to mind the realm of what could have been, just as human beings continuously dwell on what could have been and what could not have been had a single decision been made
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