Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Words: 570
Pages: 3
Open Document
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer weaves the motif of letters throughout the text to symbolize the characters’ inability to form and maintain strong relationships with the people in their lives, causing them to seek emotional support in other forms. In the letter Grandma writes to Oskar, she recalls a time in her childhood when she asked several friends and family members to write letters for her: “So I went to my piano teacher. I always wanted to kiss him, but was afraid he would laugh at me. I asked him to write a letter” (78). Although Grandma wants to express her feelings for her piano teacher, she is rule by her anxiety and instead asks him for a letter. Through the use of several concise sentences, Foer exhibits how her fear of being laughed at hinders her ability to form the emotional connection she desires, causing her to seek his attention in the letter he writes. …show more content…
Later in the novel, Grandma and Oskar discuss the letters he is writing, to figures such as Weird Al Yankovic and Vladimir Putin: “She asked, ‘Why don’t you write a letter to someone you know?’ I started to tell her, “I don’t know anyone,’ …” (106). Oskar believes he does not know anyone well enough to allow him to write them a letter. He is shown to dwell on many social situations, as displayed by the lack of paragraph breaks between thoughts and dialogue. It is this overthinking that likely contributes to his difficulty with forming close bonds with people, and consequently, the lack of people to whom he can write. Oskar resorts to writing to strangers, as he still seeks the emotional component which comes with letter correspondence and that he lacks in his own life. Similar themes appear in Thomas Sr.’s letters, particularly the one he sends to his
Show More

Related Documents: Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Essay on Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Review

/NovApp/novelist/print. NoveList : Print Go Back aspx? sid:D3 6BD4 to Document NoveList Book Discussion Guide NoveList Book Discusslon Guide NoveList/EBSCO Publishing @ 2005 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close oy H Jonathan Safran Foer (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005) H o Author: H l{ 5 lonathan Safran Foer was born in t977 and grew up in Washington D.C. As a student at Princeton, he won the Creative Writing Thesis prize each year he was an undergraduate. While a junior, he began…

Words 4793 - Pages 20