Grief, Nothing, and Something

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a story told by those left behind, those who live, whose lives are weighed down by the memories of the lost. The novel is filled with individuals who hold onto halves of a whole: Oskar’s key (the lock), the grandmother’s empty envelopes, the grandfather’s envelope-less letters, Thomas Schell’s empty coffin. In addition, these characters deal with the relationship between something and nothing (for instance, the space between the boroughs in New York City, the in-between of “Yes” and “No” tattooed on the grandfather’s hands). Each character is forced to reckon with the nothing that something—someone—incredibly close to them has become. This is, in fact, a literal nothing; in the case of Oskar, the grandmother, and the grandfather, each is left without a body, a something: “because so many of the bodies had been destroyed there was never a list of the dead, thousands of people were left to suffer hope” (215). Although this relates specifically to the Bombing of Dresden, it is nearly analogous to the case of September 11. This production of a whole can be seen as an attempt to fill the hole that trauma and death have torn open, Oskar’s project an attempt to reach back and find something in nothing.

Oskar’s grandparents, as survivors of the Bombing of Dresden in 1945, bear a unique relationship to trauma and exist in a space uncertain: “What are we?     Something or nothing?” (178). After such a horrific confrontation with existence at its most blunt and grotesque, how are they to live? Why should they live? Why are they alive, while sister/lover, father/hero are dead? In the case of the grandfather, the very idea of his life has been destroyed, his unborn child, the “roar” of a baby’s silence drowning out the bombs (213).

Oskar’s relationship to September 11 is once removed, and he is confronted with absence, with nothing, rather than thrown into it. Ultimately, he comes to realize that he must move on—that, like his mother, he must make something out of his life, and that there is nothing which will ever fill the hole that is his father. His simple solution to an impossible problem—digging up his father’s grave and filling the coffin with something is a symbolic filling of nothing—“the dictionary definition of emptiness”—in the only way possible (321). In this act, Oskar is able to recognize the finality of things: “‘What truth?’ That he’s dead’” (321). This is, perhaps, the truth that those who grieve must recognize: they are gone, yet I live on.