To Be or Not to Be?

In Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close he makes an interesting choice of plays to be performed by Oskar’s school; the choice, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  This stands out as interesting because it oddly fits so well with the text.  The parallels between Oskar and Hamlet as a character are both surprising and accurate.  Foer does an amazing job of incorporating a seemingly irrelevant Elizabethan play and associating many similar character traits between this 9-year-old September 11^th victim (victim in that his father was killed) and a young prince of Denmark.  It is curious to note that these many parallels paint Oskar as a tragic hero, him being the cause of his own downfall.  What exactly is Oskar’s downfall?   Oskar’s tragic flaw is a product of his immaturity and age, Oskar believes that he is the only one in mourning which blinds him to everything else that is happening within the plot of the novel (and since a good portion of the novel is told from Oskar’s perspective, the reader is also oblivious to all the is going on during Oskar’s search).  The first parallel between Oskar and Hamlet is obviously that each character’s father has just been murdered.  The murder of both and Hamlet and Oskar’s fathers then sets each character on a quest; Oskar goes looking for the lock to his father’s key, while Hamlet sets out to avenge his father’s murder.  The next parallel to be observed between Oskar and Hamlet is the damaged relationship between these two characters and their mothers.  Oskar is constantly mad at his mother for not being sad enough about his father’s death; “I don’t see you cry a lot” (171).  At one point even, Oskar says he wishes it was his mother that had died rather than his father by saying “if I could have chosen, I would have chosen you” (171).  The relationship between Oskar and his mother is clearly flawed and it is mostly due to Oskar’s obliviousness to what is really going on around him.  Oskar is unable to see his mother’s sadness not because she isn’t sad but because he is unwilling to accept that anyone could possibly miss his father more than he does.  The most striking of parallels between Oskar and Hamlet relates to an element of Hamlet that is in fact missing from the text.  Oskar’s school’s performance of Hamlet altered the script to make the play more accessible to children.  In doing so, Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in the hall of mirrors is condensed down to only the first line, “To be or not to be.”  This becomes increasingly notable as Oskar has a similar “to be or not to be” thought during a performance of the play.  Oskar thinks to himself, “I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live” (145).  Oskar questions his existence just as Hamlet does.  The similarities between Hamlet and Oskar make for a very interesting read of the text when closely examined.