During our first week back in ASTU, we mainly discussed the novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book is about Oskar Schell, a boy whose father died during the occurrence of 9/11, and how he and his family cope with the incident. Simultaneously, the book blends in the traumatic experiences of Oskar’s Grandfather and Grandmother during the Second World War. In class, we focused on the theme of “absence”, which is an aspect of the book that Foer seemingly includes in deliberate fashion. We agreed as a group that these absences signify the trauma that the characters suffer from the two tragic incidences. The most obvious absence shown in the book is the lack of words coming from Oskar’s Grandfather. There were some other examples of this thrown out by the class, such as the lack of other narratives, and the unsent letters.
Anyway.
To me, there seems to be another absence that did not come out during class: the lack of criticism or anger by Oskar and his family shown towards the terrorists, and the Muslim community – a community widely vilified by the American public then. The storyline consists of each character trying to get their lives back in track after what had happened, each in their own way, but those methods do not include bashing or criticizing Muslims. Instead, Oskar goes on an adventure looking for the lock that fits the key that his father left him, his mother attempts her disrememberment by listening to music needlessly loud, and having her close friend, Ron, accompany her. The same could be said for Oskar’s Grandmother and Grandfather, who experienced bombings in their hometown when they were in Germany. Their hatred toward those who bombed their town (primarily America) cannot be found, and we can even see some portrayals of Oskar’s Grandmother trying to spontaneously assimilate herself into the American culture after moving there. “[…] she wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else […]” (108). These actions/inactions illustrate how the characters in this book are passive towards what had happened. Even though they each show some kind of action, those actions are not taken to tackle the reason why their loved ones passed away. I am in no form taking this passiveness as a negative, inactivity towards justice or anything like that. What I took from this is that the narrative of this book is going the opposite direction of where the general narrative of post 9/11 in America was going back then. I support this opposition, because I feel this portrayal might have possibly been pretty accurate. Although this is only my initial feeling, and I do not have much evidence or knowledge to back it up, I have a feeling that the majority of those who roared, “revenge!” against terrorism, were those who were not directly involved in 9/11. Yes, every American citizen was “involved” in the sense that it was their land that got attacked, but most did not have any connection to those who were actually in the building and died. The only mental connections the American population had with them were that they too, are Americans, and that the same could have happened to them. I speculate that the majority of those who actually were involved in the incident, such as the characters in this novel, did not display such reaction, because of the traumatization that put a very big scar in their lives. Though the repercussions of 9/11 can still be seen today, those who were not directly involved in the incident were not traumatized by it in a true sense; they were only shocked by it, and reacted towards that shock. Those who were truly traumatized, on the other hand, could not react, because it did not matter to them who were to blame. What mattered most to them were the deaths of their loved ones.