Oh My Word: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I, nearly 11 years late, have just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close . The novel tells the story of generational trauma and the process of grieving as Oskar Schnell, the nine year old protagonist, mourns the loss of his father in the 9/11 terrorist attack. Similarly, his grandparents struggle with the legacy of the Dresden firebombing during World War II. The text mixes different narrative voices, photography and experimental visual storytelling techniques in order to convey the emotion of traumatic loss and grief. When reading the reviews of the text, it became clear to me that one particular question kept recurring: why use the visual storytelling techniques at all? what to they contribute to the text and why would Foer use them? 9/11 in particular, but other traumatic cultural events too, come with a unique kind of visual iconography. Additionally, images survive where witness testimony doesn't - often these events a...