Fine Shades of Feeling: The Effectiveness of Communicating Emotions Implicitly

Because Oskar’s grandmother tells her story non-linearly, intentionally leaving large gaps in the narrative and never explicitly stating her emotions, she is able to communicate a depth of emotion to the reader that she could not have with words.  For instance, when Oskar’s grandmother first goes to write her life story, she just types spaces over and over again, because, as she explains, her “life story was spaces” (176). In sharing those blank pages, she is able to share with both Thomas and the reader her complex longing, regret, and other unexplainable emotions.  By inserting blank pages into the narrative, Foer ensures that his readers do not merely know the sympathetic sorrow of reading that her life is “two thousand white pages” (124), but instead experience themselves the disappointment and loss of expecting words on the next page and seeing nothing but blank space.  Similarly, in the grandmother’s “My Feelings” letter to Oskar, she includes long spaces and line breaks, although this time she does use some words. These sections are entitled “My Feelings,” but the grandmother never explicitly states her feelings, instead using only the rare indistinct metaphor, such as “it felt like crying” (Foer 84), to describe her emotions.  Her feelings are to be inferred from her stories and her reactions; they reside in the spaces between her words.  In a way, the grandmother’s stories are more moving and easier for the reader to absorb because she leaves out naming the emotions and simply lets the reader experience them in the details of the story.  Had she told the reader she was “sad” or “jealous” explicitly, then the nuances of her personal emotions would have been lost. 

In contrast to his grandmother’s vague but emotional passages, Oskar and his friend Mr. Black state information about the world around them explicitly and work to fill in any knowledge gaps with explanatory words.  For instance, Oskar keeps a “feelings book” under his pillow (Foer 170) but unlike the complex, nuanced emotions his grandmother describes, Oskar writes his feelings simply and explicitly, trying to contain what he feels in a single word.  In a matter of minutes, he changes “desperate” to “mediocre” to “optimistic, but realistic” to “extremely depressed” (Foer 170-171).  He continually drastically changes his written feelings, even though his base emotional state only fluctuates a bit, because each short description of his emotions is too shallow and simple to completely and accurately describe the complex, simultaneous emotions he is experiencing. Unlike his grandmother, who expands her emotional exploration though dozens of pages of tangential writing, Oskar allows himself only one or two words of emotional expression, which is always an oversimplified and incomplete description. 

By contrasting the ways in which Oskar and his grandmother communicate emotion, Foer seems to argue that the best way to communicate emotion is to describe everything but the direct emotion, allowing the fine shades of the feeling to paradoxically become clearer.  Oskar and his grandmother both talk vaguely about having holes insides of them, but describing their feelings of loneliness and sadness as empty space, rather than matter, may actually be the most effective way to communicate the heartbreaking loss they feel.