Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.”

Even before his father died, Oskar was questioning the meaning of life after reading Stephen Hawking’s work. Confronted with the enormity and apparent randomness of the universe, he wondered what the point was of existing at all. Oskar’s father said that he did not believe in any higher purpose. He believed that things are important just because they exist, and that even the smallest things are important.

“I’d experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.”

Thomas’s future hopes were cut short when Anna and their child died in the Dresden bombing. The news of her pregnancy had come only that morning, and he had experienced a joy unlike any he had ever known. This joy was soon replaced with its opposite, and Thomas never recovered. He grew to hate himself for never being able to heal or move on from the past.

“Even though Dad’s coffin was empty, his closet was full.”

Oskar contrasts the emptiness of his father’s coffin with the fullness of his closet at home. It is a strange experience for Oskar to walk into his father’s closet, with all his belongings untouched and waiting to be worn again. The emptiness of his father’s coffin is perhaps what bothers him most about Thomas’s death, because he never learns how his father died.

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened—like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack—an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir Anyway.”

Oskar’s inventions help him cope with the trauma of his father’s death. He also feels deeply bothered by the fact that his mother never seems to cry (although she does, just not around him), and feels that it is the obligation of all those who mourn people lost during 9/11 to cry for them each night. Oskar uses the metaphor of “heavy boots” to describe not only his own emotions but also the mood of the city on a given day.

“Every time I left our apartment to go searching for the lock, I became a little lighter, because I was getting closer to Dad. But I also became a little heavier, because I was getting farther from Mom.”

Oskar notices the contradiction in his feelings as he searches for the lock. His search is a process of healing and discovery, as well as reentry to the world after a process of grieving. He feels as though it will lead him closer to his father somehow, but he also realizes that every time he leaves, he is growing up, and in doing so, growing away from his mother bit by bit. This quote illustrates The Complex Nature of Relationships.

“The positioning was the sculpting. He was sculpting me. He was trying to make me so he could fall in love with me.

He spread my legs. His palms pressed gently at the insides of my thighs. My thighs pressed back. His palms pressed out.

Birds were singing in the other room.

We were looking for an acceptable compromise.”

When Thomas sculpts Oskar’s grandmother, he is doing more than creating a statue. He is instead attempting to sculpt the person before him into something she is not—her sister. Oskar’s grandparents had a complex relationship, built upon rules and compromise. Thomas needed to see her as Anna, and Oskar’s grandmother needed to be willing to be seen that way. Oskar’s grandmother’s letters are written in the form of a free-verse poem and often use repetition and imagery such as this.

“That was kind of how I felt when I decided I would meet every person in New York with the last name Black. Even if it was relatively insignificant, it was something, and I needed to do something, like sharks, who die if they don’t swim, which I know about”.”

Oskar thinks about what his father told him about The Importance of Little Things, and this motivates him to keep searching for the missing lock. Oskar feels that he can be stagnant no longer; he must live for something and have some sort of goal. The mission provides that for him.

“She looked at the writing, and I could see that she recognized something about it. Or I thought I could see it.”

When Oskar goes to see Abby Black, he gets the feeling that she knows something about the key but isn’t being honest with him. The intuition foreshadows the novel’s conclusion, in which Abby calls and admits that her husband is the owner of the lock.

“I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: ‘Do you like me?’”

The love of Thomas’s life died when they were just teenagers. Here, in one of his letters to his son, he describes the innocence of their love and the childlike whimsy of those first weeks together. The metaphor Thomas uses here suggests that falling in love with a person also means falling in love with the world. This explains why, when he loses Anna, he feels that he has lost the world too.

“We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is a war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there’s no one left to fight!”

While Thomas and Anna make love for the first and only time, they listen to Anna’s father and his friend talking about the futility and hypocrisy of war. Only hours later, the city of Dresden is heavily bombed and Anna is killed in the violence. War circulates through each generation of this family, as Oskar and his father deal with the 9/11 attacks.

“I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?”

Oskar wonders about the purpose of life itself as he stands on the stage playing the skull of Yorick. Oskar became fully immersed in his character, and at moments began to feel dead; in order to challenge his dark thoughts of pointlessness, he awakens and speaks, despite it not being part of the play. Oskar’s use of “incredibly close” and “extremely alone” illustrate the opposing nature of his feelings and his place in the world.

“Even though I didn’t know him, I felt like I knew him.”

When Oskar meets Mr. Black, he feels instantly comfortable with him, because Mr. Black treats Oskar like an old friend from the second he steps in the door. He tells Oskar his life story and shows him around his apartment, and Oskar is overwhelmed by the amount of fascinating memorabilia. It is this instant trust that leads Oskar to invite Mr. Black to join his mission.

“Then, out of nowhere, a flock of birds flew by the window, extremely fast and incredibly close. Maybe twenty of them. Maybe more. But they also seemed like just one bird, because somehow they all knew exactly what to do.”

With his hearing aids turned on for the first time in years, Mr. Black hears a flock of birds as it passes by the window. The moment is so visceral and magnified because not only is it his first experience with sound for a long time, but it is also a symbol of Mr. Black’s and Oskar’s freedom from grief. As they journey together, they both slowly return to themselves and to the world. A two-page photograph of the birds further illustrates the significance of the moment and The Importance of Little Things.

“I COULDN’T EVEN SEE THE LOOK IN HER EYES WHEN SHE SAW THE BRUISES, BECAUSE MY SHIRT WAS OVER MY HEAD, COVERING MY FACE LIKE A POCKET, OR A SKULL.”

Foer often changes the typeface to illustrate emotions, and when Oskar knows that his mother has seen the bruises he gave himself, everything suddenly becomes extremely loud—just like the novel’s title, and this is depicted using all caps. Oskar also uses simile to demonstrate the way he is protecting himself from seeing his mother’s reaction to what he knows will be painful for her.

“I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces. The days passed one at a time. And sometimes less than one at a time. We looked at each other and drew maps in our heads.”

Oskar’s grandparents had a complex relationship rooted in secrecy and deception. This is part of the reason it didn’t last, but part of it was also the emptiness that seemed to surround them. They could never decide if they were something or nothing, coming or going, and when Oskar’s grandmother looks back on her life, all she sees is nothing. The person she loved most, Anna, was long since taken from her, and the person before her is a shell of what he used to be.

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

Oskar’s grandmother writes to Oskar and tells him of the importance of pain, honesty, and confronting the things that haunt a person. She looks back at her husband who, in order to shield himself from his worst memories, shielded himself from everything, including any chance at being happy. She reminds Oskar to let himself feel, whatever those feelings may be.

“Even though I knew that there were 161,999,999 locks in New York that it didn’t open, I still felt like it opened everything.”

The key around Oskar’s neck gives him hope and motivates him to get up the next day and try again. Metaphorically, the key unlocks Oskar’s psyche, forcing him out of his comfort zone and into the world. He meets new people, sees new places, and confronts his fears.

“But now I am alive, and thinking is killing me. I think and think and think. I can’t stop thinking about that night, the clusters of red flares, the sky that was like black water, and how only hours before I lost everything, I had everything.”

Thomas remembers how he survived the Dresden bombing by reminding himself to think. He knew that if he was thinking, he was still alive. He notes the dark irony in the fact that now thinking is what hurts him the most, because all he can think about is the horrors of that day and the people he lost forever. Thomas’s past is constantly confronting his present, and he is never able to escape it.

“When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.”

Oskar’s grandmother loves her grandson more than anything because Oskar is the culmination of all of the events of her life, her son’s life, and her husband’s life. Although they had all been through horrible experiences, it would not have been possible for Oskar’s grandparents to meet and have Thomas, then for him to have Oskar, if the war had not happened. She sees a reason for the pain and the loss.

“Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.”

Oskar is standing at the top of the Empire State Building and metaphorically compares peoples’ lives to skyscrapers. Oskar knows that everyone will die and that there is no way to escape that. At the end of the novel, Oskar has not totally overcome his fear of dying, but he has overcome his fear of living.

“When the suffering is subtracted from the joy, what remains? What, I wondered, is the sum of my life?”

Oskar’s grandfather thinks about his life and whether he experienced more joy than pain in the end. He realizes that pain is inevitable and is deeply regretful of the fact that his life was also robbed of joy. He blames himself for this. In an extended metaphor, Thomas calculates the sum of his life through a morse code phone call that he sends to his wife when he returns to New York. The next few pages are a series of numbers meant to indicate the story of his life, which he was never able to tell his wife with words.

“I wish I had known that I wasn’t going to see Mr. Black again when we shook hands that afternoon. I wouldn’t have let go. Or I would have forced him to keep searching with me. Or I would have told him about how Dad called when I was home. But I didn’t know, just like I didn’t know it was the last time Dad would ever tuck me in, because you never know.”

Like his grandmother, Oskar regrets the things left unsaid when he finds out that Mr. Black is gone. He notes the cruel irony of these regrets and the retrospective clarity that often comes following a loss.

“The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.”

Oskar’s grandmother believes that the worst regrets a person can have are things they never did. She regrets not telling her sister how much she loved her while she had the chance, because there is no way of apologizing for or reversing that decision. She cites The Importance of Little Things and of saying and doing what one feels.