Sounds of Silence

The book follows nine-year-old Oskar Schell in a quixotic quest to deal with the loss of his father, who died on the upper floors of the Twin Towers on September 11. His character, and the majority of others are quirky, sometimes forcedly so. They’re very real, too; and so, it seems, is their plight. At times, Foer’s writing finds an uneasy balance between humour and achingly real loss. Oskar hopes that a key (which he finds in an old vase of his father’s) will unlock the mystery of his father’s death – literally, how he died in the attacks – and put an end to his trauma. His ways of communicating are often the most lucid of all the characters, but Oskar is an unreliable narrator if ever there was one. The contrasts created by his youthful perspective next to the older ones of his grandparents, mother and older friends that he meets along the way are useful. But barriers of communication are unsurprisingly bigger for the older characters, or just different, perhaps, compared to Oskar’s own.

Interviews with Foer see him emphasising his own faith in communication, mostly on a personal level. Clearly, he is interested in communicating his ideas to a wider audience through literature. In doing so, personal communication is at the forefront. Foer claims to be concerned with scenes of what he called “frustrated communication”; Oskar’s speechless grandfather mainly communicates through the written words YES and NO. As a product of the information age, this is something of a retreat into the past for Foer – his own past, that of his ancestors, and something that is portrayed as important in terms of reevaluating the ways that the world communicates, in both public and private ways, after September 11.

Foer uses devastating events, ‘worst days’, to examine breakdowns in communication. Extremely Loud explores the lives of Oskar’s grandparents, who were also emotionally devastated as teens in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. The parallels between this and September 11 create further voices that each have their own concerns with how to communicate.

The use of pictures in the novel is a hugely important way of exploring communication. Even if the use of changes in typeface and font size are a little heavy-handed at times, these postmodern additions of multimedia (pictures, scribbles, flipbook style sequences) are inventive and certainly further notions of how characters converse with each other and the reader. Negative reviews of this novel, tend to focus on Foer’s preoccupation with creating a unique and quirky voice. But here, quirk and whimsy act as accessible vessels to carry heavier implications of grief and incommunicado. They’re poignant, too; especially when these visual elements fall.

This whimsy itself could be stifled by the shadow of no towers – as an event, 9/11 provokes and demands art, but in turn the event’s massive scope proves daunting. Foer’s types of voice are necessary, and here, are proof of the continued priority we place on making ourselves understood.