In his lifetime, the father devised puzzles and scavenger hunts to force his fearful son into the world, and Oskar's convinced there's a message at the finish line of his dad's final challenge. Eleven-year-old Oskar Schell struggles to find meaning after his dad dies in the World Trade Center. That book had an American trying to come to terms with the legacy of his Jewish forefathers, to counter the elusiveness of memory Extremely Loud also has a son hunting for clues. 11 so much as using it to explore themes he introduced in his Eastern Europe-set debut, Everything is Illuminated. 11 for such a sentimental work is exploitation. The expedition also allows Oskar to connect with others who are in pain when he learns about the difficulties they have faced in their lives and how they experience love and loss.Some critics are indignant over Stephen Daldry's film of Jonathan Safran Foer's book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Finding out what the key unlocks becomes Oskar’s way of both holding onto his Dad’s memory and trying to help assuage his guilt at the loss. When Oskar finds the mysterious key in Dad’s closet, he takes the key as a sign and starts an elaborate expedition, just like the kind of expeditions his Dad used to send him on around the city. Oskar is overwhelmed with guilt and grief, not only because he didn’t tell anyone about the phone messages, but, more importantly, because he heard his Dad make his final phone call but he didn’t pick up the phone. In the eleventh chapter of the novel (which may or not be coincidental, given the significance of “11” in this novel focused around 9/11), in a flashback, Dad tells Oskar the story of the “Sixth Borough,” which turns out to be a fable to help Oskar deal with loss and grief. Dad’s voice is also embedded in the structure of the novel like a voicemail. Oskar preserves the phone messages that Dad left on September 11, playing them to himself and, eventually, to Grandpa. Even though Dad is dead, we do get to hear his voice. When Grandpa sees the name “Thomas Schell” in the obituaries, he immediately boards a plane to Manhattan from Dresden, though he hasn’t been back for forty years. Other characters in the novel are also rocked by Dad’s death: Mom and Grandma, of course, are also in grief, but his death has larger ripple effects, too. Oskar feels like he has to choose between loyalty to his father’s memory or being able to be there for his Mom in the present. For Oskar, the public grief of the city becomes enmeshed with the painful, private grief of Dad’s death. Dad didn’t work in the World Trade Center-he was a jeweler, and he was visiting the towers for a meeting, which just happened to be on the morning of September 11. Thomas Schell, Jr., Oskar’s father, never appears in the novel, since it takes place after he died, but he provides its emotional center, and his death precipitates the novel’s main storylines.
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March 2023
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