On Secrets, Grief, and Isolation: Jonathan Safran Foer’s "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 bestseller grapples with some of life’s toughest lessons: grief, loss, death, and isolation. Overarching all of them like a burial shroud is something even more crippling: the inability to express one’s thoughts and feelings to another. Using the world-changing events of 9/11 as a springboard, Foer dives into these murky subjects, treating them with his characteristic literary verve and inventiveness.

We see the post-9/11 world through the eyes of Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old with an exceptionally inquisitive mind who has lost his father in the attack on the World Trade Center. How does a nine-year-old cope with grief? Oskar withdraws from the world (he calls the act “zipping into the sleeping bag of myself”), stores his feelings in the dark, loses himself in his extraordinary imagination, and upon finding a mysterious key in his deceased father’s closet, runs from borough to borough looking for clues that he hopes may lead him back to his father. Though he and his mother occupy the same space, he is alienated from her, feeling threatened by the new man she is seeing. He even blurts out at one point that he wishes it had been she who had died in the attack and not his father (which he instantly regrets). The other person in his life is his grandmother, who lives across the street. There are copious indications that they are on intimate terms, but even so, a lot is left unsaid between them.

The characters in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close are incapable of revealing their hearts to another, for reasons only known to themselves. Oskar has a big, black secret about his father’s final moments in the ravaged tower which he can only bring himself to share with strangers (one of whom is his grandfather – a fact he is unaware of).

Oskar’s mother, who is on the whole one-dimensionally portrayed, only occasionally utters words of motherly concern, and appears to be absent mentally. The reader only gets a glimpse of how badly her husband’s death is affecting her, but never enough to get a good sense of the great emotional wreckage that must lie within her. It is only towards the end that the reader is told she seeks comfort in Ron because they have both lost a loved one. Even then this is not a fact shared between mother and son. When the mother asks Oskar “to try to be nice to him,” he simply replies, “I’m tired” (316). The inability to verbalise their grief is what is keeping mother and son apart.

Oskar’s grandmother is concerned about Oskar’s well-being and keeps an eye on him, but even she has her share of secrets, secrets dating back to the time when she was a young girl and Oskar’s grandfather laid eyes on her for the first time. But these secrets are revealed only in separate chapters entitled “My Feelings,” told in fragmented monologues.

Oskar’s grandfather, too, lives with secrets and regrets. His “demons” mostly have to do with his deceased son, whose life he had never shared. He is the only character in the novel who literally cannot speak a word. Having lost the ability to speak when young, he can only communicate through the “YES” and “NO” imprinted on his hands, and a phrase book that does not meet all his needs. His repressed emotions can therefore only be expressed in one way. The reader gets to read about all of them in the unsent letters addressed to his son, apologetically entitled “Why I’m Not Where You Are.” In these letters the reader also encounters another secret in the person of Anna – a sensitive subject between him and Oskar’s grandmother. The “ghost” of Anna had been lying between them during their entire marriage, and yet she was rarely openly discussed.

More isolated lives are to be found beyond Oskar’s immediate family. The mysterious key sends Oskar on a journey that brings him into contact with a motley collection of characters who lead lonely lives.

Ruth Black, for example, lives on the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building and never goes down to street level. This has to do with her memory of her deceased husband, and her unwillingness to let go of that memory. Oskar asks her why she never went home after her husband died, her answer is: “I couldn’t bear to go home … because I knew he wouldn’t be there” (252). If Oskar had not come along to find her, no-one would have been the wiser about the life of this curious character who has chosen to live at the top of the world.

The most notable of these scarred characters is Mr Black, who lives upstairs from Oskar and whom no-one has ever seen. It turns out that Mr Black has been a recluse since the death of his wife twenty-four years ago (whom he commemorates in the most unusual manner), and when asked why he has not ventured outside even once in all those years, his answer is “There hasn’t been any reason to!” (162).

Mr Black, however, is not your stereotypical, mean-spirited recluse. He is very much intrigued and invigorated by Oskar’s visit. Oskar says when he rings the buzzer, Mr Black asks “Can I help you?” in an extremely loud voice, as if he were excited about the prospect of getting a visitor (152). Towards the end of their talk, Mr Black reveals a secret: that he is in fact deaf and has been reading Oskar’s lips. When Oskar helps him turn on his hearing aids, a flock of birds happen to fly by the window “extremely fast and incredibly close (italics mine)” (165), and the sound they make causes him to cry. Oskar’s voice makes him cry even more (166). The fact that the novel’s title appears here underlines the human need for sharing and contact, and it suggests that isolation is an unnatural state.

A character named Abby Black, whom Oskar visits at the start of his journey, is to play a key role in solving the puzzle of the mysterious key. But it is also due to her inability to communicate with her ex-husband, William Black, that delays Oskar’s discovery. When Oskar finally meets William Black, the man tells him of his own deceased father, who, too, was unable to express his feelings and resorted to writing lengthy letters to friends and acquaintances in the last two months before his death. The key (or what it opens) is the father’s legacy to his son – the inexpressible “gift” when he was alive.

After this revelatory chapter, Oskar’s world begins to make sense again. When he next sees his grandfather (whom he still does not know is his grandfather), the old man shows him the unsent letters. Oskar asks: “So what’s all that paper?” The old man finally admits (in writing): “Things I wasn’t able to tell him. Letters” (322).

On the same page, discussing as to what he should (re-)fill his father’s empty coffin with, Oskar says: “Maybe I could bury things I’m ashamed of.” But almost immediately, perhaps due to the various experiences he has gathered during his journey, he senses this is not a wise move: “But that didn’t make any sense either, because the renter [Oskar’s grandfather] reminded me that just because you bury something, you don’t really bury it.” This is the key to understanding Foer’s novel: that secrets must be out – despite our tendency to retreat within ourselves and hide from the world.

Before the novel draws to a quiet close, Oskar and his mother share a heartfelt moment when she reveals a secret to him which is as big and black as his. After this, he returns to his room and contemplates the idea of living in a paper-less world (he had read it was paper that had kept the towers burning). He then rips out some pages of his notebook, performing a visual trick that mesmerises the reader.

For in a paper-less world, the isolated could perhaps finally emerge from their tiny, claustrophobic rooms of secrets, and learn to share them with the ones who care – in a manner that is extremely loud and incredibly close.

All page numbers refer to the 2011 film tie-in Penguin edition.