A victim’s memory fails to register the event at the moment of its occurrence, because the extent of ‘its violence has not yet been fully known’ ( Caruth 1996, 6). As a result, survivors of trauma cannot grasp the magnitude of what has happened to them ( Greenberg 2003b, 23 Radstone 2003, 117). Trauma theoryĪ traumatic event is often so violent and disruptive in nature that it cannot be fitted into existing referential frameworks. In his behaviour, the boy displays characteristics of both a melancholic and a mourner. Aspects of both acting out and working through are in turn synthesised in the protagonist himself, Oskar Schell. Foer ties up this ‘old’ trauma with a fresh one – 9/11 – by having the Schells lose their only son, the protagonist’s father, in the World Trade Center.
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, these two ways of reacting to and dealing with trauma are embodied respectively by the protagonist’s paternal grandfather and by his paternal grandmother, both survivors of the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945. Typical reactions to trauma comprise either a repression of all trauma-related memory or an endeavour to remember the event and fit it into a coherent whole.īy means of a brief overview of trauma theory, this essay will uncover the aspects of melancholy and mourning in Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Melancholy and mourning both apply to memory. In the cases of those three generations of Bloch men, technology facilitates being somewhere other than in one's life.Since Dominick LaCapra’s reintegration of the Freudian terms ‘acting out’ or melancholia and ‘working through’ or mourning in the field of trauma studies ( LaCapra 1994, 2001), this dichotomy has become the default theoretical groundwork for working with trauma in literature. Sam, his eldest son, spends much of his free time in the virtual world of "Other Life." And Jacob's father, Irv, is a kind of xenophobic lawn sprinkler, shooting off his every opinion-and some opinions he probably doesn't actually have-by means of his blog. Technology is used in the book not in order to comment on expression, but as a means for characters to be "elsewhere." Jacob conducts a fantasy life through his phone, but also by browsing real estate ads on the Internet and imagining lives he knows he'll never live. You're probably asking the wrong person, though, as I don't use Snapchat or emoticons. Sometimes it feels worse, or at least shallower. Sometimes it feels better, or at least easier. You're probably aski …more We express ourselves differently. Jonathan Safran Foer We express ourselves differently.
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