Extremely Loud And Extremely Close Analysis

Silence can be louder than words. Though silence can be intimidating or awkward, many people find great comfort in it. Silence can signal many different emotions and is a quiet call for help. There are times when there is nothing to say, so silence fills in the missing pieces. Jonathan Safran Foer evidently demonstrates the power of silence in chapter 12 of his book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by making Oskar’s grandmother’s chapters spaced out, showing her feeling of emptiness, and repeating certain words, which create broken chains of thought that indicate the way her brain scatters in traumatic times. Throughout the book thus far, Oskar’s grandma constantly talks about the many rules that she and her husband set for themselves.
[She] wish[es] [she] felt empty”(231). Her feeling of emptiness is demonstrated by the empty spaces following the information about the attacks. When she creates the verbal flipbook of bodies and buildings falling, and planes going into buildings, each phrase, which represents the pictures she sees on the news, is on its own line. This spacing changes, however, when she talks about Oskar or his mother, two very significant people in her life. When talking about Oskar, who has been her main source of happiness since the day he was born, she no longer feels empty, which is part of the reason why she decided to crawl under the bed with him: she needed him just as much as he will need her after finding out about his father’s death. The bed is also symbolic of the bomb shelters that she and her family hide in during the attacks on Dresden, her childhood hometown. She lost her beloved father and sister in the attack and ran to the bomb shelter to save her own life. The bomb shelter brought both comfort and safety to her after having to say goodbye to someone she cared about greatly , and it was a shielding of her eyes to the disaster being rung upon her town. The bed, though it is not literally protecting her, is acting in a similar manner, protecting both her and Oskar from the current tragedy happening
These emotional changes occur after she has been told the news about Thomas Schell Jr., showing the way the effect shock has on Oskar’s grandmother. It makes her brain scatter, and though she is saying many words, the meaning of the words is lost because the words are out of order, making them difficult to follow. She says that “all of [her] sounds were locked inside [her]”(233), but it is ironic because, based on this chapter, it does not appear that she is having any difficulty formulating words. She talks about many things throughout the chapter, such as Oskar performing in his school play, flashbacks of her childhood, and flashbacks to Thomas Schell Jr.’s death. She feels this way because her thoughts do not make sense. Everything is disconnected and unorganized, similar to the letters she received and tried to piece together, and to all of the metal Oskar collected from Central Park and tried to put together. She continuously repeats the phrase “planes going into buildings”(232), “bodies falling”(232), and “buildings falling”(232) in unnecessary places throughout chapter twelve, however, they do not serve any purpose other than to explain to readers what is going through her head. Repeating these phrases proves that she is stuck in a moment; she cannot unsee the pictures being shuffled through the news of the collapsed buildings; she