Jonathan Safran Foer

1081 Words5 Pages
Jonathan Safran Foer writes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close about an incredibly intelligent and extremely hilarious nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. This novel is written in the shadows of one of America’s greatest tragedies, 9/11. The novel allows for its readers to contemplate grief and find the answers to what grief might be. Foer explores the realms of grief through the eyes of Oskar, who is experiencing his own loss as well as the other characters in the novel. Foer’s novel is a perfect example of the human experience of grieving, and the five stages one goes through. Grief is arguably one of the most powerful emotions that one experiences, it is the process of healing that each character has to go through in order to reveal…show more content…
Grief is extremely loud, and all of the characters in this novel are grieving over someone or something. They are grieving the loss of a family member, a marriage; they are grieving words they can’t say, or answers that won’t be found. Grief happens after one suffers a traumatic experience, they begin to go through the motions and express blinding anger. When grieving, people tend to put up defense mechanisms to protect them from the suffering and pain of losing someone they love which is known as denial. “Mom was going around Manhattan putting up posters.” (298). After the attack of 9/11, Oskar’s mother went around the city putting up posters, refusing to believe that her husband, Thomas, Oskar’s father, was dead. In doing this, it gave his mother a false sense of hope that Thomas was still alive. Another example of denial is Oskar’s grandfather, who keeps “trying to remake the girl he knew seven years before,” who had died in the bombing of Dresden (242). When someone is grieving they may expect their lost loved one to show up, even though they know that person is gone. When a person is experiencing denial, it makes it quite difficult for…show more content…
Trying to remain in the past life, trying to fight our way out of hurting, is how an individual bargains for his or her own happiness. Oskar goes out in search of the lock that fits his key, trying to make some sense of his father’s death and hoping that, “looking for it let me stay close to him for a little while longer” (959). Oskar tries to recreate his extremely carefree and incredibly close time of when his father was still alive and would give him puzzles to solve and hunts to go on, Oskar created his own adventures, making him travel the five boroughs and talk to all different types of strangers. One of the characters, Ruth Black, a widower living in the Empire State Building, was living through the past. Ruth Black’s late husband was a salesman, and he would carry an old light that would shine through the whole sky, this would help her know that he was safe. After his death she still imagines his light and it “ gave me [her] the same feeling that I’d [she’d] had when it was daytime and I [she] was looking for his light” (783). Bargaining happiness will inevitably come to an end, and will be followed by the next stage, depression. After pushing away the sadness and pain and covering it up with all the other emotions, it will finally come to the surface that the loved one is truly gone. Oskar expresses his depression all throughout the novel with the self-inflicted
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