"Extremely" and "Incredibly"

We discussed in class the use in Foer’s novel of the phrases "extremely loud" and "incredibly close." These phrases are used to describe the disaster and tragedy in that the most pertinent ones are loud and close. I am not trying to disprove this. I think it is true; however, the adverbs “extremely” and “incredibly” appear many times throughout the novel to describe different things that are not necessarily traumatic. These words seem to just be the two adverbs that are in an eight year old boys vernacular. Oskar uses these words a lot to describe anything, not just traumatic events and they seem to appear mainly in Oskar’s narration in the novel and not really in sections of any of the other narrators. Each of these adverbs appear on the first page of the novel  when Oskar is inventing—“If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, id train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart” (1). He also uses them in describing his emotions as they switch from “extremely depressed” to “incredibly alone” (171). Oskar uses these words with little significance or relation to trauma, but I did notice that many times “extremely” is related to sound; such as when he talks to Thomas for the first time and comments that he was “trying to hear something incredibly quiet underneath what I was saying” (255). Oskar is just emphasizing the degree of what he is trying to express in his eight year old way, not the extremity or incredibility Foer emphasizes of disaster and tragedy.

As the title of the novel, Foer is trying to emphasize the extremely loud and incredible closeness that tragedy and disaster have in relation to people’s lives. But it would be difficult to assume that the many appearances of these adverbs in the novel have that much relevance. I think Foer is just trying to capture the voice of an eight year old boy, and the persistent use of maybe the only two adverbs Oskar knows  is contributing to that and not a larger theme or complex psyche of Oskar as a narrator.