Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel that shows very different characters and how they choose to react to tragedy and love. Thomas Sr. (hereafter just referred to as Thomas) is literally a man of few words. Foer develops a character who is flat and surprisingly static.

Looking at the multiple letters we have from Thomas, we begin to see the rationale behind the stoic, silent man. It is the loss of Anna that haunts him for the rest of the life. This loss is why he insists on the rules that we hear in “Why I’m Not Where You Are.” Thomas is entirely defined by this experience. In “My Feelings” Thomas starts to sculpt Anna by using the grandmother. The grandmother is just a literal stand-in for Anna. He is so consumed by being Anna’s boyfriend that he can’t see his wife as anything but Anna’s sister. Thomas can’t connect with his son because Anna had been with child when she died. “I’ll never be your father and you’ll always be my son” he informs the child. Thomas is entirely defined by losing Anna and this makes him a hopelessly flat character.

Thomas writes, in “Why I’m Not Where You Are,” that “I’m leaving her today.” Thomas flirts with leaving every time he enters the airport to fetch the magazines and further in he does finally leave. Thomas’ exit and re-entrance, while thematically important to understanding the relationship between Oskar’s grandparents, had the potential to redefine his person and to redirect his life, but they don’t. He doesn’t return because he suddenly realizes a profound love for the grandmother nor does he leave her because he has any intensely good or bad feelings; Thomas is afraid to live and he realizes that being with Anna’s sister is the most comfortable way to avoid the effort of connection.

Maybe some of Thomas’ flatness is a result of his contrast with rounder characters like Oskar and the grandmother, but even when he is given multiple opportunities to share his life story and emotions, he never succeeds in attaining depth.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has one of the most unique narrative formats. While most books are double-spaced and full-page narratives, Foer breaks away from this norm and adds countless disruptions. These aren’t just distractions though. All the strange pictures, odd fragments, and sudden breaks contribute to the reading experience, enhancing the story and allowing us to dive into his plot.

In particular, I found the image on page 98 very interesting. Oskar has just started his search, and after visiting a woman named Abby Black, he wants to take a picture of her. She hesitates, so he captures the back of her head instead. Although I didn’t think much of the picture at first, I realized its symbolism as I got farther into the story. In my opinion, this indirect shot of the woman parallels Oskar’s life – he struggles in dealing with his pain and fears directly. For example, when asked to come to the ninth floor of a building, Oskar says, “I can’t go up…Because you’re on the ninth floor and I don’t go that high” (90). Oskar is scared of heights. He is haunted by his father’s death. He is terrified of the future. To me, this indirect picture mirrors Oskar’s beginning character: afraid, unsure, and hurting.

If Foer had not included such images, he would have lost a major element of the story. In the book, there are countless disruptions like the one described above that add an additional layer of depth to his book. I loved Foer’s narrative techniques because his story reflects real life where everything connects. The present connects to the past, the past connects to the future, and the future connects to the present. By using these disruptions in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer crafted an extremely realistic and unique masterpiece.

In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Foer resolves each character’s conflict, but instead of them all being separate, they all contribute to Oskar’s final resolution. The first thing resolved is the key and what it opens. Oskar had been so close to the owner of the key when he visited Abby Black, the second Black he met with. The owner of the key has also lost his father. In Edmund Black’s letter to William, it is revealed that their relationship was not all that great. The letter was formal and business-like in nature. It was distant. Oskar then follows up this story with his own last message from his father; which seemed to be almost begging for “you” to answer the phone. Through this meeting Oskar does not get any closer to his father. The key that he thought was his, actually belonged to someone else and his father gained it on accident. What Oskar did get from this exchange was that his father was finally being remembered as a good man. He looked for his dad in Mr. Black’s bio for the longest time and was still hopeful up until he pulled his own name out of the bio.

Next we have the resolution of Grandma and the renter. Once again this is all in a letter being addressed to Oskar. This is written the day after Oskar and the renter dig up his dad’s grave, so it is important to note that at the end of the book, when Oskar is back in his room, he has not received this letter. In this letter, the reader witnesses the grandma’s desire to remain together with Thomas. She says that she cannot stand to be alone and that she will do whatever it takes to remain together, even f that means staying at the airport, this in a way mirrors the lady that stays in the Empire State building. Both grandma and this lady cannot stand to return to their previous lives if the one that they loved were not there. She ends her letter with a sad story about not being able to tell her sister that she loved her the night before the bombings. She then follows that by saying, “It is always necessary.” This is a comment on how unexpected life can be and that just because things seem to be alright now, in a few moments they could drastically change. This is evident in the messages left for Oskar by his dad. In five out of six messages, his dad was calm and collected. He seemed to be fine, but in the sixth Oskar knew that something was wrong, and he never got to tell his dad that he loved him or anything because he could not answer the phone.

Lastly we get Oskar resolution with his mother and Ron. Oskar begins to give Ron a chance, even though he may be asking him extremely difficult questions, this is the most Oskar and Ron have interacted in the novel to this point. The next morning while he is trying to sneak back in, his mother and he have a talk, which results in a lot of crying by both parties. Oskar is bonding with both Ron and his mother, before he even gets his Grandma’s letter. His talks with William Black leads Oskar to be closer to his mother, as he does not want be have a similar relationship William had with his father. He wants his mom to be happy and is willing to allow her to fall in love again. This shows great character development in Oskar. He no longer restrained by his father’s death. He has found a way to live. His dad will be remembered as a good man, at least by William Black, and his mom still has a shot at love, and she knows that Oskar loves her.

“Help”

One simple written word jars readers from a comfortable complacency. Out of context, the word “help” could mean anything. It could refer to anything. But to us, and more importantly, to Oskar, help is everything.  

Situated on an empty page, “help” screams louder than any block of text ever could. Why use 100 words when one will convey the same message?

Foer often diverges from typical printed pages to show relationships and how his characters’ minds work and process. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel that explores these relationships and the interwovenness of human life through and around tragedy. Foer, through this atypical writing style, seems to be making the claim that life is not linear. Contrasting to what most authors would have us believe, life is a constant mystery, a jumble of emotions. Only at the end can we make sense of what has happened.

Events are messy and so is the mind. Through these divergences, Foer expresses the mind of a young boy, tragically trying to make sense of the death of his father. Pictures, letters, and handwritten words from his grandfather all add to the experience of Oskar’s loss. To the reader, this adds to our confusion and helps us to reside in Oskar’s mind. We feel his emotion. We are confused with him. Our minds travel in all of his tangents. As readers, Foer takes us for a ride through this unusual writing technique.

The disruption of this technique lies in our expectations as readers. We are conditioned to read a story from beginning to end, expecting semi-linear motions. Foer challenges this notion. However, his challenges lend towards the aforementioned result: we enter the mind and life of Oskar Schell.

In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, we go from

“My first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. Self-defense was something that I was extremely curious about, for obvious reasons, and Mom thought it would be good for me to have a physical activity besides tambourining” (2)

to

“To my unborn child: I haven’t always been silent” (16)

It’s a bit of a culture shock after fifteen pages of listening to a nine year old to suddenly hear from this older gentleman.Who is this man? How is he related to Oskar? Why am I reading this letter? All of these questions come up instantly in the reader’s mind when the narrator changes.

This sub-plot of sorts of the Grandparents’ letters certainly adds a new dimension to Foer’s story. Adult perspectives with wisdom and insight are able to present events quite differently from Oskar’s inevitably childish perspective.

Having this insight come from the first person point of view helps the reader to connect with the character’s emotions on a level that would not be the same in third person.

“Grandma knew Oskar was in the room, being silent.”   is very different from

“You were silent, but I knew you were there.      I could feel you.”

This shows readers the emotional connection that Grandma feels to Oskar, and that this connection is so real to her it is almost tangible.

The emotions this novel invokes are deep and complex, inspired by Foer’s ability to draw us in with each of the characters’ narration. The love between each of these characters is so real you could almost touch it, and it seems unlikely that this depth of emotion would be possible without the first-person narratives of all of these characters.

In Foer’s, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a captivatingly playful novel about a young boy on a mission to make sense of a post 9/11 world, the readers are introduced to diversions other than just print on pages. We see these diversions in the form of pictures, irregular spacing, pages of just numbers, a page of handwritten text, and then the eye catching red annotating that fills up three pages of Foer’s text. So why does Foer choose to add these diversions? They cause the reader to step back from the text as a whole and concentrate on particular points at specific spaces in time. We’re truly able to feel what the characters are feeling and see what they say. It makes what Foer is writing about come across to his readers EXTREMELY loud and INCREDIBLY close.

One thing that is found numerous times throughout the novel is the irregular spacing in Oskar’s grandmother’s narrative. Upon first stumbling upon this, myself as a reader did not think of it to be of much importance, however my mind did wonder as to why Foer was writing the grandmother’s narrative this way. On page 176 the grandmother finally gives readers a discreet, yet powerful line that could explain why she writes this way. “I hit       the     space     bar     again    and    again   and   again.           My    life    story was      spaces.” (176)  The spaces within her writing could symbolize the spaces of void and emptiness that she feels toward the loss of her son, as well as her strained relationship with the grandfather that fostered many years ago.

This conclusion causes readers to empathize with the grandmother, and by Foer adding her personal narrative letters throughout the text as well, readers become aware of what these spaces in her life are caused by. It is a playful narrative technique that Foer uses, but it makes readers take a step back from Oskar and the key mission, and focus on the grandmother who has been hurting much longer.

[The name of the title comes from Episode 2 – The Glow Cloud in the “Welcome to Night Vale” podcast series]

Magical Realism is the beautiful attempt to challenge the constructed nature of society through the cohabitation of fact and fiction to “question what is considered real” (Magical Realism from New Frontiers in Education, Culture, and Politics: Critical Pedagogy and Global Literature : World Teaching). Magical Realism wants us to ask ourselves about why we consider some things to be strange and to question our own reality.

Tropic of Orange works very hard to leave the audience unable to truly understand or genuinely connect with both the characters and story. The importance of that is why Yamashita would use magical realism to achieve this effect. The novel sees Arcangel move a geographic boundary and the child’s heart that casually interacts with the characters. These magical moments are interspersed in the novel and aren’t treated as the “magical” elements that they are.

“Commonplace binary configurations — magic and reality, life and death, body and spirit, fact and fiction, self and other, center and margin — commingle and coexist on an equal footing. Neither aspect is more important nor more characteristic of reality, and consequently, the coexistence of these opposites destabilizes or displaces the usually accepted hierarchies normally found within binary relations” (Magical Realism from Writing Between Cultures : A Study of Hybrid Narratives in Ethnic Literature of the United States).

Arcangel just happens to remember the dying men fighting in battle and Buzzworm listens to music. The big accident was caused by the poisoned oranges and Rafaela is a mother. Tropic of Orange presents the magical in the middle of the ordinary and that is how it qualifies as magical realism. Yamashita uses our lack of clear foundation to explore other topics: cultural diversity, relationships, and how we ought to interact with each other. The book is broken up into very individual accounts and never feels cohesive and this leads the audience to ask why we crave more order and quality relationships from our characters.

To address the elephant in the room, I’ve embedded a link to the “Welcome to Night Vale” podcast series because this series is a playful work that is magical realism with awareness. The characters acknowledge that no people or dogs are supposed to be in the dog park in straight dead-pan voice. If Tropic of Orange was too incohesive, but you want to explore magical realism, this free podcast is a great way to continue.