Boroughs and Neighbours

298 PLL Matthew Mullins

298

Boroughs and Neighbors: Traumatic Solidarity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s

Extremely Loud & Incredibly CloseMATTHEW MULLINS

Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, was released to overwhelming expectation, anticipating both its failure and its success. The novel follows nine-year-old Oskar Schell on a quest to discover the meaning behind a small key left in an envelope labeled “Black” by his father who has died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Oskar’s adventures take him on a literal and psychological journey in dealing with the traumatic loss of his father. In his recent book on Philip Roth, David Brauner has offered an overview of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’s critical reception, focusing especially on the problematic characterization of Foer’s protagonist as young and naïve, wandering around a dangerous city alone, and seeming a little more precocious than some reviewers find believable. While Brauner’s primary goal is to juxtapose the reviews of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close with the reviews of Roth’s The Plot Against America, he defends Foer’s own argument that “expectations of realism were misplaced” in relation to Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (189). And it seems that arguments about Oskar’s believ-ability as a nine-year old are secondary to the more important ideas of trauma, identity, and community. In fact, the novel pro-poses alternative conceptions of identity that encourage global community across existing identity boundaries, especially those of nation and culture.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close transcends the newly strength-ened boundaries of national identity created in the wake of 9/11,

“Boroughs and Neighbors” PLL 299

positing an alternative conception of community. The novel blurs lines of demarcation between victims, perpetrators, and witnesses of the attack and thus calls to our attention a problematic “us versus them” mentality that typically results in more violence and trauma. Foer contests an “us versus them” reaction to trauma because the self-perceived “us” identity is far more complicated four months after the event than four days after the event. The primary way in which the novel blurs these identity lines is by focusing its gaze on the traumatic U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden during World War II rather than focusing on the details of the attacks on the World Trade Center. In addition, the text views trauma inflicted by “us” instead of on “us” to suggest that trauma can be a unifying experience, one that encourages solidarity across various boundaries of identity. Trauma is not limited by nationality and thus has the capacity to create new identities. Ultimately, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close suggests traumatic solidarity should breach identity borders, not merely reinforce them.

Prior to the events of 9/11, K. Anthony Appiah argued that “The major collective identities that demand recognition in North America currently are religion, gender, ethnicity, ‘race,’ and sexuality,” with a footnote nod to the fact that these dif-ferences occur within the framework of nationality (151). I would add to Appiah’s argument that nationality experienced a resurgent demand for recognition as a major identity marker in America in the wake of the violence associated with 9/11. I will rely partially here on Amartya Sen’s conception of identity in relation to violence. Writing in 2006, Sen suggests that the problem with violence is that it often drowns out the plurality of identity (i.e. the various collectivities mentioned by Appiah) and promotes instead “a sense of inevitability about some allegedly unique—often belligerent—identity that we are supposed to have which apparently makes extensive demands on us” (xiii). Sen’s conception of identity and violence is important because it clarifies the fundamental problem of identity I see addressed


in Foer’s novel. Like Appiah and Sen, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close suggests that all individuals are members of numerous col-lective groups, such as class, gender, occupation, and religion, but goes one step further and posits an alternative identity that connects individuals in these various, and sometimes opposing, groups. What I propose is that traumatic solidarity is an addi-tional collective that works across these group identities. For example, an individual may belong to a specific religious group or nation, but because of the solidarity found in trauma, that individual can also belong to a collective to which members of different religious groups and nations also belong. Thus, while acknowledging differences, traumatic solidarity is grounded primarily in similarities.

Foer’s novel is, of course, not the only work of fiction published in response to the events of 9/11 that deals with the relation-ship between trauma and identity in a global context. Novels by writers such as Ken Kalfus and Don DeLillo have addressed “the disconnect between America’s self-image and its image in the eyes of the world” (Kauffman 353).1 While DeLillo uses references to similarities between the oppression of American economic influence in the world market and the German fas-cism surrounding the Baader-Meinhof scandal in Falling Man to suggest that America is seen as an ominous presence on the world stage, Foer chooses to call America’s self-perception into question by focusing on violent acts committed by the U.S. One of the most significant questions that must be answered in any reading of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is why Foer focuses on Hiroshima and Dresden in an effort to investigate notions of traumatic solidarity immediately following the events of 9/11. Of course, I do not at all wish to suggest a strict equivalence

1Linda S. Kauffman explores DeLillo’s essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” his short story “Baader-Meinhof,” and his novel Falling Man. The connection between Ger-man fascism and American economic oppression on the world stage comes from Kaufmann’s essay “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man.”


between Hiroshima, Dresden, and 9/11, but there is some value in analyzing past tragedies of varying scale that might shed some light on current events, especially considering how Foer’s novel opens the door to these connections. After all, 9/11 is not the first time the U.S. has been challenged by conflicting views of its identity in the global community and brought to critical awareness of the larger social problems that arise following traumatic events.

World War II afforded many opportunities for literature, film, and other media to entertain questions of what it means to be patriotic in the wake of terrible events. Published a mere three months prior to the 9/11 attacks, an article entitled “Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America” suggested that following World War II, “the narrative of heroism, patriotism, and democracy that permeated wartime America—the story that Saving Private Ryan seeks to restore only partially—began to decompose immediately” (Bodnar 809). The article suggests that “The war showed Americans that their fellow citizens were as capable of inflicting brutality as citizens of other nations” and goes on to examine the natural tendency of nations to cre-ate a fictionalized sense of solidarity based on victimization in the wake of traumatic events (Bodnar 809). A similar national sentiment arose in America immediately following the events of 9/11, and novels such as Foer’s go a long way in exposing myths of America as lone victim.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close combats following 9/11 what was called a “displace[ment] [. . .] of trauma from the combat zone to American society” in the wake of World War II (Bodnar 809). Foer’s novel suggests that the “other” identity groups who were becoming and now are the objects of retribution were and are not truly “other” at all. In fact, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close posits an unbreakable bond between identity collectives such as nations based on the common experience of trauma. Foer does not eradicate identity borders, however, but posits a sense of community that crosses those borders. Ultimately, “The


Sixth Borough” parable, told to Oskar by his father, provides the most coherent narrative moment in which to investigate the implications of traumatic solidarity in our current geopolitical context. This part of the book can be read as a possible com-mentary on the proximity of cultures in an increasingly global cultural system in which Foer sees the “America as lone victim” ideology as a myth that must be exposed for the sake of national and international community.

The sociopolitical effects of trauma create a theoretical paradigm through which people can relate or separate them-selves from one another to create or understand identity. As Cathy Caruth argues, “The traumatic nature of history means that events are only historical to the extent that they implicate others” (188). In its immediate aftermath, trauma creates “other” identities in the forms of perpetrators, victims, and wit-nesses. While Caruth explains that, when aligned with Freud, this conception of identity “does not suggest that the response to trauma must necessarily be the mistreatment of the other” (188), that is exactly what I am saying is the result of trauma, especially when it occurs on the national level. Identity seems clear in the wake of a traumatic event, but Foer complicates this clarity by demonstrating that identity is not located within any single paradigm. As Appiah and Sen point out, identity is not composed of nationality, race, or gender alone, and so I would suggest that neither is it composed of victimization alone. Trauma problematizes, more than it clarifies, identity, and thus reactions should err on the side of unity, not division. Trauma and identity have a complicated relationship in which both seem to play a fundamental role in creating each other. Claire Stocks has claimed that “The effect of trauma on memory, the necessity for effective and honest communication of the dis-turbing experience and the sense of self-division which often results from a traumatic encounter have a profound effect upon constructions of identity” (71). Stocks makes her argument in the context of the effects of Western psychoanalysis’ attempt to


address “exposure to extreme experiences” (71). The events of September 11, 2001, certainly constitute “extreme experiences,” and the sense of national identity that arose in the wake of the attacks was prompted by the national sense of being victimized by the trauma of those events.

New York Times reporter Bob Herbert summarized a speech given by President Bush just a few weeks after the attacks: “He expressed the collective anger of the nation, declared that the U.S. would mount a sustained global assault against terrorism, and bolstered the sense of national unity that flowered in the aftermath of the attack.” Considering Amartya Sen’s explora-tion of social community as “social capital,” as first advanced by Richard Putnam, the rhetoric in the U.S. following 9/11 may have seemed natural (2). Sen points out that the same sense of identity that can cause us to act on behalf of others in our com-munity can also quickly lead to strong reactions against other identity collectives. After 9/11, national identity functioned in a complicated way, uniting Americans across the social, cultural, and racial spectrum of individual identity while simultaneously creating a stigmatized view of non-Americans and an especially stigmatized view of Arab or Middle Eastern “others.” This re-surgent sense of national solidarity naturally fostered the desire to unite further by striking those who had done “us” harm on September 11, 2001.

This formulation of national identity is dangerous because it leads to a mindset Slavoj Žižek describes by saying, “Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal with real enemies in the real world. [. . .] However, whom do we strike? Whatever the response, it will never hit the right target, bringing us full satisfaction” (35). Žižek goes on to acknowledge, “In the aftermath of September 11 the Americans en masse rediscovered their American pride, display-ing flags and singing together in public” (45). Žižek ultimately suggests that these displays of patriotism through both flags and counterstrikes rest on a sense of victimization in the wake of the attacks. America adds to its identity as dominant world power


the title of international victim, and, as the film Saving Private Ryan has done in its treatment of the aftermath of World War II, this sense of victimization following 9/11 is best challenged by cinema and literature. In this context, Foer’s novel becomes a space in which to challenge the effects of national solidarity and America’s sense of being the lone victim after 9/11 and to promote instead a connection between victimization and identity that breaches existing collective identities. That is to say, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close complicates this sense of America’s uniqueness as victim by returning to the atrocities of Hiroshima and Dresden enacted by the United States on Japan and Germany. When the novel’s protagonist, nine-year-old Oskar Schell begins his search for the meaning of the lost key that he thinks will bring him closer to his father, he encounters a woman named Abby Black. He begins to question her about the key, and she begins to cry for reasons Oskar does not understand. Oskar, having lost his father, wonders to himself, “I’m the one who’s supposed to be crying” (96). Similarly, it seems odd at first that a novel addressing mourning and loss in the wake of 9/11 would give detailed accounts of the aftermaths of Hiroshima and Dresden. In a sense, shouldn’t America be the one crying? The novel focuses on these accounts in order to destabilize a sense of entitlement and victimization for any single group based on trauma, not because the events of 9/11 fail to merit mourning, but because such sentiments can lead to dangerous attempts to solidify national identity through inflicting more trauma on others. Such reactions perpetuate an endless cycle of inflicting and enduring traumatic violence.

Violence committed against an “other” (nation, group, person, etc.) reinforces existing identity markers and bound-aries, and thus Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close casts doubt on that sense of national identity in an effort to disrupt the logi-cal connection that follows between national identity and the expression of that solidarity through violence. Foer’s novel is not the only work of post-9/11 fiction to deal directly with lines


of demarcation between victim and perpetrator. In his 2006 novel, Terrorist, John Updike’s protagonist is a teenage would-be terrorist growing up in America. Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy is a disciplined young man sickened by the moral corruption of modern American culture in his New Jersey town. He works hard and practices his religion vigorously and sincerely, but ultimately he falls prey (as Updike structures the narrative) to the schemes of the violent extremists of a local Islamic sect. As Ahmad drives a box truck filled with ammonium-nitrate fertil-izer and nitro-methane racing fuel into New York City intent on destroying himself and countless others, his high school teacher Mr. Levy persuades Ahmad to pick him up on the side of the road. As the two exchange information and arguments about what the young man intends to do, Ahmad regurgitates the hateful rhetoric he has been fed, saying of Christians and Jews, “‘Even with the oil, they despised us, cheating the Saudi princes of their people’s birthright.’” Mr. Levy responds, “‘That’s some ‘us’ you’ve worked up, Ahmad’” (295). “Us” versus “them” is a mindset that pervades all sides of a cultural and global conflict. Updike further confuses the boundaries between perpetrator and victim by creating sympathy for Ahmad and finally allowing him to be talked down from his murderous plan. It is at this mo-ment that Updike reminds us of 9/11, “It could be a nameless spot in northern new Jersey; only the silhouette, dead ahead, of the Empire State Building, once again the tallest building in New York City, signifies otherwise” (307). The would-be terrorist is an eighteen-year-old kid, his Jewish teacher is his friend and father figure; the lines between “us” and “them” are radically blurred. The outpouring of artistic responses to 9/11 demon-strates the attempts to disrupt this antagonist mindset through cinema and literature.

In his introduction to a collection of post-9/11 fiction, Ulrich Baer suggests that the tragedy of September 11 “com-pels ‘us’ to recognize how tenuous and dangerous the notion of a clearly defined ‘us’ has always been” (3). The notion of


“us” is so tenuous and dangerous because it is necessarily and eternally contingent on the notion of “them.” So, how should we conceive ourselves and others? One suggestion comes from “Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criti-cism,” where S. P. Mohanty draws on passages from Foucault, Cixous, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as epigraphs to argue that:

What the passages urge us to do is radicalize the idea of difference itself—the other is not us, they insist, and is quite possibly not even like us. Herein lies the challenge: how do we conceive the other, indeed the Other, outside of our inherited concepts and beliefs so as not to replicate the patterns of repression and subjugation we notice in the traditional conceptual frameworks? (4)

Mohanty goes on to challenge this notion of the other, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close makes a similar move by us-ing trauma that might normally reaffirm an “us versus them” notion of identity to destabilize that notion of identity.2 Here I see a connection between Foer’s novel and Amartya Sen’s notion of agency in Identity and Violence. Sen argues that com-munal identity is not so much a matter of “self-realization” as it is a matter of choice (5-6). Just as Sen acknowledges that such choices are made within certain constraints, I, too, will acknowledge that tragedies such as 9/11 do not necessarily signify an endless supply of positive identity choices. Since trauma is an experience common to all people regardless of social, political, or cultural difference, however, it seems logi-cal to suggest the events of 9/11 as an opportunity to foster community instead of as an opportunity to foster difference, hatred, and violence.

2Mohanty uses Charles Taylor’s concept of “incommensurability” to argue that “they” are not so different from “us” because “‘they’ do ultimately what ‘we’ do, since they share with us a capacity for self-aware historical agency” (23). Mohanty’s sense of Taylor’s “incommensurability” suggests that the other is not so different from us be-cause while our activities may be different, “‘they somehow occupy the same space’” (23). Thus, there is common ground even in difference.


In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Oskar repeatedly com-plicates an “us versus them” conception of identity in the wake of trauma. When Oskar finds the envelope with the name “Black” written on it in his father’s belongings, he systemati-cally begins to call on every person in New York with the name Black. The aforementioned Abby Black is among Oskar’s first and most significant visits. As Oskar approaches Abby’s house, he notices “a little sign above the door that said the poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay once lived in the house, and that it was the narrowest house in New York” (90). Jean Gould writes of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the time in which she wrote that “It was apparent, moreover, that the war which was to have made the ‘world safe for democracy’ had done nothing of the sort. There was more suspicion of foreigners, more persecution of ‘radicals’” (105). Gould goes on to comment that it was during this time that Millay “wrote her most distinguished verse play, Aria da Capo, an arresting allegory denouncing war as a means of settling disputes among men” (106).3 While it may seem like a not-so-hidden message, Oskar’s connection with Abby Black in the house Edna St. Vincent Millay once lived in ultimately leads him to the person who will solve the mystery of the key. Foer seems to be pondering what it means to live in a world in which violence and war create suspicion of “others,” and instead of simply mourning that assessment, he also seems to be sug-gesting that those suspicions and boundaries can be overcome by joining people, even strangers, together in the wake of a trauma like 9/11.

Oskar invites Abby and all of the other “Blacks” he meets during his quest to come see his school’s production of Hamlet,

3Aria da Capo features a play within a play in which two friends engage in a dispute, and then one poisons himself and his friend. The play ends as two actors from a dif-ferent play are initially disgusted by the dead bodies but then are able to get over the shocking sight by covering the dead men with a table cloth and go about eating their meal. Millay seems to be commenting on our ability to ignore death and injustice that does not seem to affect us directly.


in which he is playing Yorick.4 When he looks out on the crowd he sees “Albert and Alice and Allen and Arnold and Barbara and Barry. They must have been half the audience. But what was weird was that they didn’t know what they had in common” (143). Oskar brings all these different people together under one roof because of the traumatic experience of losing his fa-ther. All of the “Blacks” already live in the same city; Oskar has simply united them under one roof for one evening. Foer shows that trauma should be a unifying experience across boundaries of identity rather than simply within those boundaries. None of the “Blacks” become like anyone else or lose their individual identities; they simply share a name and an elementary school auditorium for a little while. Foer is using this gathering of strangers to contest an “us versus them” reaction to trauma be-cause the “us” identity is far more complicated two years after the trauma than two months after the trauma.

Foer also uses Oskar to suggest that trauma should not be a self-identifying marker for any particular group by making it impossible for Oskar to gather information about the terrorist attacks from American sources. In fact, Oskar complains on more than one occasion about how far removed he is from the details of the terrorist attacks: “‘I found a bunch of videos on the Internet of bodies falling. They were on a Portuguese site, where there was all sorts of stuff they weren’t showing here, even though it happened here. Whenever I want to try to learn about how Dad died, I have to go to a translator program and find out how to say things in different languages” (256). Oskar can only learn about what happened to him from other perspectives.5 He

4Foer’s play within a novel is immediately reminiscent of Millay’s play within a play in Aria da Capo. While he may not have known Aria da Capo, at the very least Foer would be familiar with the fact that Millay was an active antiwar poet and playwright.

5Laurie Vickroy asserts that victims of trauma struggle with self-knowledge and with personal identity because they feel the constant need to fulfill others’ visions of themselves: “This is particularly true in cases of trauma, where others’ acknowledg-ment is essential to healing” (49).


cannot understand his own identity from his own perspective; he is forced to learn key words in different languages and then Google those words: “like ‘September,’ which is ‘Wrzesien’” (256). Oskar is not the only child in post-9/11 fiction who struggles with comprehending the events of September 11. The title of Part One of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man is darkly but humorously titled “Bill Lawton” because “Bill Lawton” is the name three children in the novel have mistaken for “bin Laden” after misunderstanding his name on newscasts. The children spend hours watching the skies, and their parents cannot figure out what they are doing until one of the kids lets the name Bill Lawton slip out to his mother, and the parents discover that they are “searching the skies for Bill Lawton” (DeLillo 74). Just as Oskar cannot gain access to information about the attacks, Lianne, the mother in DeLillo’s novel, explains to her husband about their son, “‘He didn’t see it on TV. I didn’t want him to see it’” (72). When Oskar does not know how to respond to the trauma of 9/11, he is forced to look to other cultures, such as the Japanese response to Hiroshima, thus opening up lines of communication across traditional identity boundaries. But to understand the complicated connection to Hiroshima, we must first observe trama’s influence on Oskar’s behavior and how this influence affects his self-perception and his perception of the world around him.

Oskar’s perception of how he should respond to the trauma of losing his father is only one aspect of his identity that is shaped from without. His identity is also shaped by a cultural sense of propriety with regards to the disparity between his inner and outer actions and reactions. Many of the most entertaining and simultaneously disturbing passages in the novel occur when Os-kar indulges in passionate outbursts of swearing, only to explain later that he had not really said anything of the kind or anything at all. When his therapist asks him if he believes any good can possibly come from his father’s death, Oskar responds, “‘No! Of course not, you fucking asshole!’ That was what I wanted to do. Instead I just shrugged my shoulders” (203). And earlier in


the novel, Oskar (playing the part of Yorick’s skull) swears at a bully (playing the part of Hamlet) onstage in the middle of an elementary school performance of Hamlet:

ME. Alas, poor Hamlet [I take JIMMY SNYDER’s face into my hand]; I knew him, Horatio.

JIMMY SNYDER. But Yorick . . . you’re only . . . a skull.ME. So what? I don’t care. Screw you.JIMMY SNYDER. [whispers] This is not in the play. [He looks for help

from MRS. RIGLEY, who is in the front row, flipping through the script. She draws circles in the air with her right hand, which is the universal sign for “improvise.”]

ME. I knew him, Horatio; a jerk of infinite stupidity, a most excellent masturbator in the second-floor boys’ bathroom—I have proof. Also, he’s dyslexic.

JIMMY SNYDER. [Can’t think of anything to say]ME. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs?JIMMY SNYDER. What are you talking about?ME. [Raises hand to scoreboard] Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging

crevasse-hole dipshiitake! (145)

Oskar’s rant carries on for another full page but ends with “It would have been great,” indicating that he never actually said anything out loud (147). Oskar does not express his impulsive true thoughts and ideas. Foer shows his inner monologue to the reader but withholds it from the other characters in the novel. Thus, the need to react violently and emotionally against people who do not truly affect Oskar (such as the therapist and Jimmy Snyder) is removed as a viable option.

This depiction of Oskar’s reactions to traumatic events (such as questions about what good can come from his father’s death) is problematic because of his young age, and it brings us back to the critical reception of the novel. As Brauner has demonstrated, the crux of the problem with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close for reviewers seemed to be the inability or unwillingness to buy Oskar as a nine-year-old. But rather than becoming a pitfall for a naïve interpretation of what I am calling traumatic solidarity, the point is not to conceive of Oskar as an inordinately bright wunderkind who has orchestrated a number of identity/community border-


crossings. Instead, the significance of Oskar’s youth is precisely that other people experience a certain sense of community as a result of his actions. The fact that Oskar is too young to under-stand the implications of his connections with victims from myriad traumas throughout history strengthens the novel’s push for valuing similarity equally if not more so than difference. In fact, Oskar’s youthful ignorance regarding the histories of Hiroshima and Dresden might be read as evidence of Foer’s insistence on community based on common traumatic experience regardless of cultural or natural history. Granted, Oskar is worlds apart from the children in DeLillo’s novel who confuse bin Laden with Bill Lawton, and from those in Ken Kalfus’s novel about 9/11, but a nine-year-old protagonist quite simply might also allow Foer the freedom he needs to offer his own critique without coming across as reactionary or outraged. Foer creates a very special character who has childlike innocence, which gives him the openness and learning capacity of any child, but who also has a certain magnified precociousness, which makes him simple, complex, and profound all at once.

Ultimately, Foer demonstrates the complexity of the “us versus them” relationship created by trauma through Oskar by enabling him, on a very elementary level, to distinguish between terrorists and “Arab people.” Oskar proclaims early in the novel, “Even after a year, I still had an extremely difficult time doing certain things [. . .]. There was a lot of stuff that made me panicky [. . .] airplanes, fireworks, Arab people on the subway (even though I’m not a racist), Arab people in restaurants and coffee shops and other public places” (36). Oskar claims not to be a racist, and yet he is scared of certain people purely based on their outer appearances. However, Oskar equates his fear of Arab people with his fear of airplanes and fireworks, and he does not claim to hate these things. Oskar does not want to repay airplanes and fireworks for the terror they have caused him, and neither does he want to repay Arab people for the traumatic violence that cost him his father. In fact, later on in the novel when he


does proclaim hatred for a terrorist, there are no identity labels attached: “I was imagining a plane coming at the building [. . .]. I imagined the last second, when I would see the pilot’s face, who would be a terrorist. [. . .] I hate you, my eyes would tell him. I hate you, his eyes would tell me” (244). Oskar is able to separate the identity of a terrorist from any particular culture or nationality. Oskar seems to understand that many “others” are also capable of experiencing terrible traumas, and his interest in a Japanese woman’s tale of heartbreak and distress reveals a complex cross-cultural identification between victims of trauma in very different contexts.

It seems odd that a novel described in multiple reviews as “the 9/11 story we need” delves into the atrocities inflicted on Japan and Germany by the United States in the course of World War II (Jain). A little more than halfway through, the novel seems to jump abruptly into a chapter entitled “Happiness, Happiness.” The first three pages are a transcript of a tape-recorded interview with a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima who lost her young daughter in the catastrophe. Oskar is playing the record-ing as part of some sort of show-and-tell at school. The details are vivid and violent: “There were maggots in her wounds and a sticky yellow liquid. I tried to clean her up. But her skin was peeling off” (188). Oskar narrates, “I pressed Stop on the boom box, because the interview was over. The girls were crying, and the boys were making funny barfing noises” (189). The scene continues as Oskar’s teacher informs him that he is done with his presentation, while Oskar insists that he has more to say. Instead of bringing in his collection of “Stuff That Happened to Me”6 for show-and-tell, Oskar chooses to share this traumatic recording of another victim, from another trauma, in another country, a trauma inflicted by the United States.

6Oskar keeps what amounts to a scrapbook of images that he calls “Stuff That Hap-pened to Me.” Among the images are: a picture of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, a design for a paper airplane, a picture of New York City with a blank space where the Towers stood, and a picture of an evolving ape-human couple.


Oskar identifies with the woman in the recording because she has lost someone incredibly close to her. Cathy Caruth ar-gues that the notion of trauma can help us “understand that a rethinking of reference is not aimed at eliminating history, but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, of precisely per-mitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (182). Oskar looks back to Hiroshima, albeit unconsciously, in an attempt to understand the attacks on the Twin Towers. He does not ask the questions we might expect a nine-year-old boy who has just lost his father to ask. He does not look to the mother who lost her daughter to the atomic bomb for a tuto-rial on mourning or grief. Instead, Oskar seeks to understand the technical aspects of the bombing’s fallout, and he narrates them to his class:

Another interesting feature that has to do with the explosion was the re-lationship between the degree of burning and color, because dark colors absorb light, obviously. For example, a famous chess match between two grand masters was going on that morning on a life-size board in one of the big city parks. The bomb destroyed everything: the spectators in the seats, the people who were filming the match, their black cameras, the timing clocks, even the grand masters. All that was left were white pieces on white square islands. (189–190)

Understanding these technical aspects of the trauma not only seems to give Oskar some kind of security but also sets him apart from the other children. Jimmy Snyder asks Oskar, “Why are you so weird?” (189). Oskar’s experience of trauma separates him from the rest of his peers and yet connects him to a Japanese woman from his grandparents’ generation, supporting Sen’s idea that “the people of the world can be classified according to many other systems of portioning” (10). For my purposes, trauma vic-tims do not become a separate subculture, but trauma becomes, instead, another category or collectivity in which members of vari-ous identity collectives can find community. But trauma, unlike these other collectivities, offers individuals from any conceivable group the opportunity to share an identity marker.


Oskar’s ability to sympathize with a Japanese victim of Hi-roshima is only an indication of a deeper connection across identity markers in the novel. What is significant about this pas-sage is not only that Oskar feels a connection with this woman, but also that he is physically connected to other victims of the same conflict without knowing it. Oskar is the grandson of two people who survived and also lost loved ones in a horrible WWII bombing, giving him an even more direct connection to the Japanese woman from the tape. We return here to the importance of Oskar’s naivety, which once again suggests that traumatic solidarity is unique because it transcends individual knowledge, and even individual identity. Thus, while Oskar is more intimately connected with the Japanese woman than he can possibly understand because of his young age, the con-nection he can understand is that they have both experienced terrible trauma and have both lost someone they loved. Oskar’s connection with the woman from the tape is deeply complex, but for him the connection is simple.

Foer is not demonstrating that trauma sets its victims apart from others, as Oskar’s exchange with his peers in the classroom following his show-and-tell might seem to suggest. Instead, Oskar’s experience of trauma connects him with others who have experienced trauma (as in the case of the Japanese woman on the tape) even though they have experienced it in different ways. Trauma actually brings people together across identity boundaries (not simply within those boundaries). As the wide range of contributors to Ulrich Baer’s collection 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 suggests, trauma creates a common experience for its disparate victims. Baer has stated that “New York’s capacity to interweave adjacent but otherwise unrelated lives into gripping stories is most breathtaking when it juxtaposes the utterly dissimilar” (9). Oskar’s experience is unique to him, but his trauma creates connections across identity boundaries. His unknowingly complex connection with the Japanese woman who lost her daughter exemplifies a transnational community,


not just a community within the bounds of those victimized by 9/11. Foer does not sacrifice the woman’s Japaneseness, or Oskar’s Americanness, or any other personal identity markers either character may have. Instead, he simply posits connections across those identity markers.

Another traumatic historical parallel with Oskar’s story is his grandmother’s and grandfather’s story. Both of Oskar’s grandparents are survivors of the U.S. and British bombings of Dresden near the end of World War II. The novel looks back on perhaps two of the most controversial military events in U.S. history (Hiroshima and Dresden) to complicate a seemingly simplistic view of what it means to be the victim of trauma in the wake of 9/11. How can “we” only be the victim when “we” too have participated in incredibly violent acts? Oskar’s grandfather had planned to marry his grandmother’s sister, but this sister, Anna, died in the Dresden bombing. When Oskar’s grandparents meet in America years later, they decide to marry.

Foer’s retelling of the Dresden bombing comes through Oskar’s grandfather’s voice, although, for the majority of the novel, Thomas Schell (Oskar’s grandfather) has no voice, liter-ally.7 We actually see the bombing of Dresden that Thomas has recorded for his own son (Oskar’s father) to read. The chapter is entitled “Why I’m Not Where You Are 4/12/78,” and it is one of many chapters so entitled, each with a different date. This chapter is unique in the book because it is filled with red ink underlines and circles, suggesting corrections. The chapter goes into vivid and horrifying details of Grandfather Schell’s expe-riences immediately following the bombings. He gruesomely describes how he was forced to kill animals in the zoo, among other traumatic experiences. Nowhere in the text does Oskar or

7Oskar’s grandfather does not speak. He does not lose his voice or endure any physical ailment that causes him to become mute. He explains early on that he lost language, not his voice, one word at a time: “I haven’t always been silent, I used to talk and talk and talk and talk, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, the silence overtook me like a cancer” (16).


any of the characters describe the horror of 9/11 in the graphic terms used in both the account of the Japanese woman after Hiroshima and in Thomas Schell’s post-Dresden account.

Oskar’s grandfather’s traumatic past manifests itself in his lost voice and in the red markings all over the pages of “Why I’m Not Where You Are 4/12/78.” He literally begins to lose words, and this erasure of language signifies an inability to talk truth-fully and accurately about past traumatic events. Foer makes a specific allusion here, both in the gruesome war account and in explicit language, to Tim O’Brien’s collection of narratives on the Vietnam war, The Things They Carried,8 as Oskar’s grandfather recounts the words he has lost: “‘I lost ‘carry,’ I lost the things I carried—‘daybook,’ ‘pencil,’ ‘pocket change,’ ‘wallet’—I even lost ‘loss’ (16–17). The loss of “loss” suggests a blurring of the lines between absence and loss.9 This muddled distinction is important because Oskar never knows the “old” version of his grandfather. He only knows a man who does not speak. This conflation of absence and loss complicates traditional views of absence and loss in which loss is seen as stemming from an his-torical event and absence is seen as independent from history. Dominick LaCapra has suggested that the “very ability to make the distinction between absence and loss [. . .] is one aspect of a complex process of working through” (699). Since Oskar’s

8O’Brien blurs the lines between fact and fiction, absence and loss throughout The Things They Carried. The collection is best known for its chapter entitled “How To Tell A True War Story,” in which O’Brien grapples with what it means for any histori-cal event to be true when it is converted into print. Oskar’s grandfather deals with the same issue as he loses his speech and begins to write down everything he needs to communicate, oftentimes returning to things he’s written that may not precisely express what he needs to say to avoid having to write something else, or when he has run out of paper.

9Dominick LaCapra has commented on what happens when the distinctions between absence and loss become blurred by saying, “in post-traumatic situations in which one relives (or acts out) the past, distinctions tend to collapse, including the crucial distinction between then and now wherein one is able to remember what happened to one in the past but realize one is living in the here and now with future possibili-ties” (699).


grandfather is unable to make that distinction, he passes the trauma down to Oskar, ironically enough, through his own absence from Oskar’s life. This seeming detour into the compli-cations of Thomas Schell’s life mirrors the quagmire of trauma and identity that arose in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. Whose trauma was this? Did it belong to the victims of the attacks, the people directly connected to those in the Towers, New Yorkers, Americans, the West, the world? Just as Thomas Schell’s traumatic past transcends the boundaries of his personal life, so also do the traumatic events of 9/11 transcend the boundaries of culture, class, and national identity. Foer sees these terrible events as an opportunity for community. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close addresses the problems of national and global community and posits possible solutions to these prob-lems not only through traumatic solidarity, but also through Oskar’s father’s narration of a bedtime story about New York’s fabled Sixth Borough.

In the novel’s first chapter, Oskar asks his father to tell him a story. His father begins the story of the Sixth Borough amidst a chorus of interruptions from Oskar. After recounting the story’s first few lines, and his various interruptions, Oskar says, “When the story finished, we turned the radio back on and found someone speaking French” (14). At this point in the novel, we, as readers, have no idea what the Sixth Borough story is about beyond its premise that New York City had a Sixth Borough “Once upon a time.” Oskar does not return to the story for another two hundred pages. When he does finally recount the story, he repeats the tale’s introduction and all of his own interruptions, but instead of saying, “When the story finished…,” he goes on to narrate his father’s entire story of the Sixth Borough. The Sixth Borough was an island separated from Manhattan by a body of water that could be jumped across by the world’s greatest long jumper. It is eventually discovered that the island is moving further away from New York, and the inhabitants must choose whether or not to remain or flee to the


mainland. The key image of the story is Central Park. Oskar’s father explains that Central Park used to reside in the center of the Sixth Borough but was relocated to Manhattan as the island began to move using giant hooks. Central Park becomes the connection between the old, unified New York world, and the new, separated New York world. The former Sixth Borough is now floating around the planet with “a gigantic hole in the middle of it where Central Park used to be” (222).

The novel depicts a seemingly lost unity that was never truly lost at all. The heart of the Sixth Borough, Central Park, remains in the center of Manhattan, and the former borough is floating about aimlessly with a hole in its heart. This imagery shows that the two worlds are inextricably linked. There can be no one-to-one, allegorical or archetypal comparison for Manhattan and the fabled Sixth Borough, but Foer paints a picture of a once-unified world that only appears to be no longer unified, when, in fact, the heart of that world remains common and available to all people. The novel suggests that the “other” has never been separated from “us,” but that the other has been here in “our” midst all along. What city in America can be thought of as more diverse than New York? The heart of the once-unified world remains in the midst of Manhattan. But the tale of the Sixth Borough is not the only global image of community in the novel.

Oskar’s radio and Mr. Black’s apartment are two more examples of a transnational, global world in the center of the novel. Oskar’s shortwave radio acts as a connection across iden-tity borders early in the novel. Just before the first telling of the Sixth Borough story, Oskar’s father helps him use the shortwave radio to pick up a Greek broadcaster: “We couldn’t understand what he was saying, but we lay there, looking at the glow-in-the-dark constellations on my ceiling, and listened for a while” (13). Understanding the Greek man’s language is not the focal point of the passage. Oskar and his father simply listen to the man’s voice. Oskar’s father speaks up and connects the Greek-speaking man to Oskar’s grandfather saying, “‘Your grandfather spoke


Greek’” (13). Foer constantly uncovers the immediate connec-tions that transcend national, cultural, linguistic borders. Oskar and his father also hear a French voice over the shortwave after his father’s story about the Sixth Borough. Oskar immediately makes a connection between himself and the French speaker by saying, “‘it reminded me of the vacation we just came back from, which I wish never ended’” (14). Oskar constantly finds the “other” in himself and is constantly located in the context of a larger global community. Oskar even hears his father’s voice for the last time in a manner similar to the way he hears the voices on the shortwave radio—on the answering machine. His father becomes another one of the distant voices that Oskar seeks to find in himself.

Mr. Black’s apartment is yet another example of a global community contained in a small space in the novel. The first thing we learn about Mr. Black is that he lives in Oskar’s own building. We then learn that Mr. Black has not left his apart-ment in twenty-four years. And yet, the entire world seems to exist inside Mr. Black’s apartment. He has rugs from Iceland, a sword from Japan, and stories from the Jazz age, Kenya, and Pakistan. Oskar tries to keep a list of things to remember from Mr. Black’s apartment and marvels:

The list in my head was getting incredibly long: Francis Scott Key Fitzger-ald, powdering her nose, Churchill, Mustang convertible, Walter Cronkite, necking, the Bay of Pigs, LP, Datsun, Kent State, lard, Ayatollah Khomeini, Polaroid, apartheid, drive-in, favela, Trotsky, the Berlin Wall, Tito, Gone With the Wind, Frank Lloyd Wright, hula hoop, Technicolor, the Spanish Civil War, Grace Kelly, East Timor, slide rule, a bunch of places in Africa whose names I tried to remember but had already forgotten. It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn’t know inside me. (154)

Mr. Black’s apartment represents a sensory overload of global experience, and Oskar’s goal is to “keep all the things I didn’t know inside me.” Foer goes on to make Mr. Black, this hub of transnational identity, Oskar’s companion in his quest for the mystery key’s owner, thus lending Oskar the aid of a man with


knowledge and experience of virtually the entire world (perhaps another characterization unconcerned with realism). After be-ing amazed by Mr. Black’s cosmopolitan apartment, however, we find out that not only has he remained in his apartment for the last twenty-four years but also that he has had his hearing aids turned off for years. This man of the world has remained locked up in his apartment for more than twice Oskar’s entire lifetime without hearing so much as a single voice. Mr. Black shows Oskar an entire world inside a world and then tells Oskar that he’s been reading the boy’s lips throughout their conversa-tion. Oskar asks, “‘Do. You. Want. Me. To. Turn. Them. On. For. You?’” to which Mr. Black responds, “‘I don’t know how to say yes!’” (165). Oskar turns the hearing aids on slowly, and as he does, a flock of birds flies noisily by the window. Here, with the birds, Foer interrupts his text with an image of a flock of birds erupting across two pages. Mr. Black opens Oskar’s eyes, and Oskar opens Mr. Black’s ears. Oskar can see beyond his small world for the first time, and Mr. Black can hear the outside world again for the first time in years. The insertion of an im-age into the text unifies the sights and sounds that Oskar and Mr. Black are simultaneously experiencing and reexperiencing. Foer’s mingling of the auditory and visual senses demonstrates the complexity of understanding the global community and breaks down a barrier perhaps just as complicated as culture or race: age.

The story of New York’s fabled Sixth Borough is the culmi-nation of the various auditory, visual, and global images Foer employs. The novel depicts a New York that was once united with what is now a separate and seemingly unknowable world. But when we look into the center of the city, Central Park, we find the heart of that unknowable and detached, that “other” world. The “rest of the world” is not “them,” and “we” are not “us.” Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close suggests that “we” were not only once connected to “them,” but also that those connections were never truly lost. The possibility of a global community has


never disappeared. Instead, our hearing, like Mr. Black’s, has simply been turned off for so long that we have forgotten what the world sounds like. The sounds have never been silenced; we have simply not been listening.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close posits an unbreakable bond both within as well as between nations based on the common experience of trauma. In the wake of the devastating tragedies of September 11, Americans are connected through traumatic solidarity, not only with each other in a common bond of vic-timization, but also with survivors of Hiroshima and Dresden, cities the U.S. devastated near the end of World War II. Thus Foer avoids what Amartya Sen terms “plural monoculturalism,” wherein multiple “styles or traditions” merely exist alongside one another without ever meeting (156–57). Oskar’s father’s death in the terrorist attacks opens Oskar’s eyes to the global community of which he is part, and it unites members of that global community across identity borders in ways as simple and entertaining as gathering them all in an elementary school auditorium to witness a grade school rendition of Hamlet. As in his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Foer brings people of seemingly unconnected backgrounds together and emphasizes their similarities. In Everything Is Illuminated, the protagonist (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) finds himself in the middle of Europe with a young Ukrainian man and his grandfather trying to find the shtettle from which Jonathan’s grandfather had escaped during World War II. Foer, the novelist, sets up Jonathan and Alex (the young Ukrainian) as mirror images of each other. Foer not only brings out the similarities between these two characters who seem worlds apart, but he also tells the entire story of the novel, Jonathan’s story, through Alex’s voice. The novel is, in fact, made up in part of a series of letters Alex writes to Jonathan. While Jonathan and Alex may not be able to walk in each other’s shoes, they can tell each other’s stories, and the outbreak of literary responses to 9/11 suggests a similar idea.


Oskar Schell is a young boy who has not yet developed all of the “us and them” ideas and vocabulary. He talks openly about race and terror throughout the novel and is able to move freely within and through identity borders precisely because of his youth and lack of exposure to years of reinforced identity markers based on difference. At the conclusion of his father’s Sixth Borough story, Oskar tells his dad, “‘I know there wasn’t really a sixth borough. I mean, objectively.’” His father asks, “‘Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” and goes on to explain the difference. Oskar decides he is an optimist, and his father responds, “‘Well, that’s good because there’s no irrefutable evidence. There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced” (221). Then his father tells him about names carved in trees in Central Park that were suppos-edly gestures of love between people from the Sixth Borough and says, “‘we will never be able to prove that those names be-longed to residents of the Sixth Borough, and were carved when Central Park still resided there instead of Manhattan. Some people believe they are made-up names [. . .] that the gestures of love were made-up gestures’” (221-22). In one sense, it does not matter if the gestures of a once-united world are real or not. What matters in the novel is what Oskar decides to believe for himself. I would argue that Foer, like Oskar, is also an optimist and that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close offers hope in the idea of global community.

Foer is not as concerned with whether or not we were once a global community as he is with whether or not we can become a global community. The novel contains no nostalgic desire to return to a pre-9/11 time of happiness or certainty. Neither is the novel concerned with eradicating cultural traditions or borders that make cultures, people, and families unique. The novel does not posit a world in which everyone is the same and controversy never arises. Instead, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close celebrates difference while emphasizing community. Foer places the entire world inside Mr. Black’s apartment, Oskar


invites all the people named Black he meets to his school play, and the trauma of Hiroshima and Dresden become renewed opportunities for transnational empathy. The novel does not shortchange or denigrate any particular culture or national experience but sees trauma as a common bond across identity collectives. Foer blurs the lines between “us” and “them” and offers difference as an opportunity for community instead of confrontation because when we do violence to the “other,” we truly do violence to “ourselves.”

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MATTHEW MULLINS is a doctoral student and instructor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he focuses primarily on American literature and theories of community. He also serves as assistant editor of International Poetry Review.

Boroughs and Neighbours

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