Hey guys!

So as you know from last week’s blog post, we just finished the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This week we followed our usual ASTU protocol and read a couple of journal articles that pertain to the novel. First we read ‘Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Narrative Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ by Ilka Saal, and then we read “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” (Frames of was: when is life grievable?) by Judith Butler.

Just a quick side note: In class today Dr. Luger explained to us that if Foer is our primary source, then Saal would be our secondary source or textual analysis of Foer’s novel, and Butler’s article would provide us with our lens.

Though I found Butler’s article to be a bit dense and hard to understand at times, there were a few points that could not be mistaken. For instance, early on she writes “If I identify a community of belonging on the basis of nation, territory, language, or culture, and if I then base my sense of responsibility on that community, I implicitly hold to the view that I am responsible only for those who are recognizable to me in some way” (Butler 36). Through this she is explaining that we often only care about the lives of those in which we consider to be apart of our “community”. In class we talk and read a lot about the distinction that many people make between “the us” and “the them”. I find that this passage from Butler’s argument really solidifies that idea.

Another passage that I felt really stood out reads “public grieving was dedicated to making these images iconic for the nation, which meant of course that there was considerably less public grieving for non-US nationals, and none at all for illegal workers” (Butler 38). This struck me as important. I hadn’t considered the fact that there were many people lost in 9/11 who American’s didn’t really mourn.

As I was only five old on September 11, 2001 I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on, and I have no real memories of that day, and anything I know about it I learned through school, American media, and American adults. Because of this the idea that there were many people killed on that horrible day that were never grieved by my country was never mentioned, or considered. I reading Butler’s article I found the idea so upsetting in tragic.

http://www.911memorial.org/explore-memorial

Oh, and one more side note. You might not be able to read this, but when I was searching for an image of the 9/11 memorial I typed in “9/11” and one of the first things that came up was “9/11 jokes”…. I just thought that was completely messed up, and I wanted to share it with you guys.

Thanks for reading this week!

Olivea

Hey there readers!

Welcome back, and happy New Year! This semester in ASTU we got right into it with a novel called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s a wonderful novel that follows a young boy, Oskar, on his journey in the search of a lock that fits a mysterious key. He found the key in the closet of his father who was tragically killed in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In parallel to his story we follow the stories of his grandparents through letters.

As I read this novel something that stood out to me was the sadness that I felt for the Oskar’s mother. Along with the struggle of losing her husband, she tries her best to make her son happy, but it is a struggle at best. When she tries to stay strong for him he doesn’t believe she’s showing enough sadness over the loss of his father, and when she makes a friend through a loss support group, he accuses her of being in love with another man too quickly. He asks her to promise never to fall in love with another man. When she can’t make such a promise he says “If I could have chosen, I would have chosen you,” (171). Through this he means that he would rather have lost her than his beloved father. Though he’s just a child and he immediately takes his words back, I can’t imagine the pain she must have felt in that moment.

As I read the book I could tell that Oskar had always been much closer with his father. And after the tragedy the distance between mother and son was probably felt more deeply. He struggles to open up to her throughout the book.

For some reason those scenes between Oskar and his mother really stood out for me as heart breaking.

Thanks for reading!

Olivea