User:Slice-of-insanity/sandbox

Sypnosis
The main protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell. Oskar Schell's father Thomas Schell dies in the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, before the narrative begins. While looking through his father's closet, Oskar finds a key inside a vase, along with a slip of paper reading "Black." Curious, Oskar sets off on a mission to contact every person in New York City with the last name Black, in alphabetical order, in order to find the lock to the key his father left behind. The novel also tells a separate narrative that eventually converges with the main story through a series of letters written by Oskar’s grandfather to Oskar’s father and by Oskar’s grandmother to Oskar himself. The letters detail the past relationship of Oskar’s grandfather and his first love, Oskar’s great-aunt Anna, and the later relationship of Oskar’s grandfather and Oskar’s grandmother. After Anna’s death and Oskar’s grandfather’s survival in the firebombing of Dresden during WWII, Oskar’s grandfather loses his voice completely and does not meet Oskar until nearly the end of the novel.

One of the first people Oskar meets in his search for the key’s origin is a forty-eight-year-old woman named Abby Black. Oskar makes friends instantly, but she has no information on the key. Oskar continues to search the city, meeting an old man he calls “the renter”– as he is the new tenant in Oskar’s grandmother’s apartment– who is in reality Oskar’s grandfather, in the process. Eight months after he meets Abby he finds a message on the answering machine on which Oskar’s father’s last phone calls are recorded: Oskar kept the answering machine a secret from his mother, hiding it in his room. It is revealed that Abby had called Oskar directly after his visit, saying “[she] wasn’t completely honest with [Oskar], and [she] think[s] that [she] might be able to help”. Oskar returns to Abby’s apartment, and Abby directs him to her ex-husband, William Black.

When Oskar talks to William Black, he learns that the vase used to belong to William’s father. In his will, William’s father left William a key to a safe-deposit box, but William had already sold the vase at the estate sale to Thomas Schell. Oskar tells William something that he “never told anyone”- the story of the last answering machine message Oskar received from his father, during the events of 9/11- a repetition of the words “Are you there? Are you there? Are you there?” Oskar then gives William Black two keys, the one to the William’s father’s safe-deposit box and one for Oskar’s apartment.

Oskar returns home and decides to dig up his father’s grave. He is joined in his mission by the renter, and after opening the empty coffin Oskar decides to fill it, but he is unable to decide what with. The renter suggests the letters that he wrote but was never able to send to his son, and they fill the coffin and re-bury it. Upon coming home, Oskar flips through a succession of photographs depicting a man’s fall from the World Trade Center, organizing them in reverse order, and thinking that “if I’d had more pictures, he’d have flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would have poured into the hole the plane was about to come out of [...] We would have been safe.”

Characters
Oskar Schell, a self-proclaimed inventor, is the nine-year-old protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His thoughts have a tendency to trail off into several far-flung ideas, such as ambulances that alert passerby to the severity of the their passengers’ conditions and plantlike skyscrapers, and he has several assorted hobbies and collections. He is very trusting of strangers and makes friends easily, though he does not have many friends his own age.

Oskar’s grandfather, Thomas Schell Sr. (also referred to as “the renter”) is an important character in the story, even though he does not physically meet Oskar until the book’s end. After the death of his first love, Anna, Oskar’s grandfather loses his voice completely and consequently tattoos the words “yes” and “no” on his hands. He carries around a “daybook” where he writes phrases he cannot speak aloud.

Abby Black is William Black’s ex-wife. She is forty-eight years old and lives by herself. She is friendly and welcoming to Oskar when he arrives at her house, though she does decline Oskar’s offer of a kiss.

William Black, Abby Black’s ex-husband, is the owner of the key found in the vase. After his father’s death, William Black read his father’s last letter to him and felt bitter, as unlike the heartfelt letters his father sent to others the one addressed to William was businesslike. William Black did befriend Oskar and listen to his story respectfully.

Thomas Schell, Oskar’s father, dies before the events of the book begin. Oskar remembers him as caring, smelling of aftershave and always humming the song “I Am The Walrus” by The Beatles. Thomas Schell organized several expeditions for Oskar, such as a game to find an object from every decade of the past century, and this is one of the reasons Oskar even begins his journey in the first place.

Oskar’s mother, referred to as “Mom” in the book, cares for her family very much. After Thomas’s death, Oskar’s mother tells Oskar “I won't fall in love again.” Though it is implied that she knows Oskar is running around the city meeting strangers, she nevertheless allows him to do so in order to discover more about his father.

Oskar’s grandmother is a kind woman who is very protective of Oskar. She calls out to him often, and Oskar always responds with “I’m okay” out of habit. When she arrived in America, she read as many magazines as she could to integrate herself as best she could, and entered into a tumultuous marriage with Oskar’s grandfather. The two split apart before the events of the novel.

Anna is Oskar’s grandfather’s first love. Oskar’s grandfather falls in love with her instantly. She dies in the Dresden firebombings of World War II after telling Oskar’s grandfather of her pregnancy.

Themes
Major themes of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close include trauma, mourning, family, and the struggle between self-destruction and self-preservation. One literary journal provides an in-depth analysis of the specific types of trauma and recuperative measures that Oskar’s grandmother and Oskar’s grandfather go though after the Dresden firebombings, and that Oskar goes through after the loss of his father. The journal states that Oskar has a simultaneous death wish and extreme need for self-preservation: this theme is echoed in Thomas Schell Sr.’s pronounced survivor guilt and Oskar’s grandmother’s well-disguised inability to cope with her trauma. It also states that though Oskar’s journey to “find” his father did not help him get over his traumatic experience, it did allow him to grow closer to his mother.

Reception
“Foer’s excellent second novel vibrates with the details of a current tragedy but successfully explores the universal questions that trauma brings on its floodtide,” wrote Rebecca Miller of Library Journal. “It’s hard to believe that such an inherently sad story could be so entertaining, but Foer’s writing lightens the load”.

Background
Jonathan Safran Foer’s inspiration for his main character came when having difficulty with another project. In an interview, Foer stated, “I was working on another story and I just started to feel the drag of it. And so, as a side project, I got interested in the voice of this kid. I thought maybe it could be a story; maybe it would be nothing. I found myself spending more and more time on it and wanting to work on that”. On the challenges of writing a novel in a child’s voice, Foer responded, “It’s not the voice of a child exactly,” adding that “in order to create this thing that feels most real, it’s usually not by actually giving the most accurate presentation of it.” Foer was sleeping off jet lag after returning to New York City from a trip to Spain, when he was woken by a phone call from a friend: “He said, ‘You have to turn on the TV, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center’. And then he said, ‘I think it’s going to be a very strange day’,” said Foer. In another interview, Foer said, “I think it’s a greater risk not to write about [9/11]. If you’re in my position-- a New Yorker who felt the event very deeply and a writer who wants to write about things he feels deeply about-- I think it’s risky to avoid what’s right in front of you.”