Unlocking Trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in terms of the representation of trauma caused by the September 11 attacks that took place in New York in 2001. The novel's nine-year-old narrator Oskar Schell loses his father in the horrid event, which incites a traumatic experience. Aiming to mark the development of this experience, the paper employs the two following concepts: acting out and working through, which have been reintegrated into the field of trauma studies as such by Dominick LaCapra, and were initially Freudian terms (melancholia and mourning). The paper also comments on the belatedness in Oskar's experiencing trauma, an occurrence in realization that was explained by Sigmund Freud and reiterated by Cathy Caruth in her work concerning trauma. Following the analysis of Oskar's experience of trauma, the paper confirms his moving from the stage of acting out to that of working through, and concludes by confirming LaCapra's viewpoint, that a full closure might never occur.