I Want an Infinitely Long Blank Book and the Rest of Time

   

In many ways, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a book of parallels, with comparisons between fathers and sons, the bombing of Dresden and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the methods of communication employed by numerous characters. Letter writing as a form in particular is privileged throughout the novel, though the use of images where words fail is also very prevalent. A visual parallel which caught my eye was of the two images above, the first of Oskar’s grandfather’s overlapped writing in his last letter to his son and the second of the night sky on the night he and Oskar unburied Thomas Schell’s empty coffin and filled it with all the letters his father had written him but never sent.

The first image is representative of how Oskar’s grandfather has too much to say to “his unborn child”. As he says in an earlier letter, he has “so much to tell…the problem isn’t that [he’s] running out of time, [he’s] running out of room…there couldn’t be enough pages” (132). Because he becomes mute, there is a special limitation on how much he can say, and so in general Oskar’s grandfather resorts to recycling what he’s already said or simplifying his answers to “yes” or “no”. In the case of his last letter however, he simply cannot be concise and so he “[needs] more room, [he has] things [he needs] to say, [his] words are pushing at the walls of the paper’s edge” (277) and become more and more cramped together until they overlap and become incomprehensible.

The second image is signifies how there are no words sufficient enough to express what Oskar is feeling as he and his grandfather unbury his father’s empty coffin. “Because it was so dark, [they] had to follow the beam of [Oskar’s] flashlight” (317) in order to be able to find Thomas Schell’s grave. When “the batteries in the flashlight ran out, and [they] couldn’t see [their] hands in front of [them]” (319) then only the night sky remains, just as unintelligible as the overlapped writing.

With both images though nothing precise can be discerned from them, the emotion of them, the overwhelming blackness as well as the miniscule white space, is clear. There is pain but there is also hope, bleeding through despite the pitch darkness. In my opinion, that is the point of everything Foer is trying to say in his brilliant novel.