Category: Reflections

I didn’t think it would ever stop raining. I woke up and dressed for cold, and was met by drizzle instead. I am of the belief that drizzling is almost a thousand times worse than actual rainfall, because it creeps in, makes you all wet and cold, but is not brave enough to be outright.… Continue reading oskar’s been inside my head.

Throughout the novel, Oskar’s boots manage to become light and heavier through the progression of the story line. The metaphor of the boots was something that he learned from his father and therefore, this method was continuously used throughout the novel in order for Oskar to not only express his emotions to the reader, but… Continue reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Heavy

I still find it very interesting how difficult  it is to articulate some (well, most) aspects of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  I love this book and I do think it’s cute.   As someone who experienced loss similar to Oskar’s as a child, I find the accuracy and profundity of his thoughts and experiences to… Continue reading EL&IC

At this point I have only read up through page 217 of EL&IC, so I don’t have a full view of Tuesday’s reading to apply to this post.  Instead, I want to look closely at one section, the one headed “Why I’m Not Where You Are” (208-216).  Ignoring for now the red ink corrections, I… Continue reading Safari in Dresden

While Oskar seems like an unreliable narrator in parts of the novel, I still thoroughly enjoyed the novel as a whole. One theme that I found in the novel was the importance of human bonds and connections. Characters in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, specifically Oskar and his granparents, cope with disaster and… Continue reading Connections in EL&IC

I have been thinking about our discussion in class about whether or not Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a work of magical realism sans magic. Although I think that we made a strong argument in favor of this idea in class, it occurred to me that maybe that this novel is a work of… Continue reading The Yellow Submarine Wallpaper

I have one all time favorite passage in this book (and I’ve read ahead and finished it), but still Oskar meeting Mr. Black is my favorite scene. On page 165, Oskar fixes his hearing aid, “We looked at each other. Then out of nowhere, a flock of birds flew by the window, extremely fast and… Continue reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I’m very idealist, but I knew I couldn’t walk that far, so I took a cab” (p.147). Although it is hard not to like Oskar and feel his pain for his extraordinary loss, it becomes extremely difficult that a nine-year-old would talk like that. As we discussed in class, I think it is true that the… Continue reading A very UNRELIABLE narrator.

As I’ve said in class, I’m not a fan of the experimental things being done with text in this book. For me, they’re a distraction: the blank pages, page after page with only a single line on them, pages whose whitespace is being slowly invaded by words written over and over each other until they’re… Continue reading Form, function, and content

In class today we were discussing how Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a beautiful, experimental novel that can’t be easily articulated. I believe I’ve found at least one “smart” thing to say about it, which is the subtlety of loss the prose expresses. One passage in particular highlights this delicacy: “Even though Dad’s coffin… Continue reading Nothing to Say

The two central characters in The Road most definitely show signs of post traumatic stress disorder, though not necesessarily as defined by the Black Hole of Trauma essay.  Struggling to find any direct connection between the essay and the novel, i went online to look for symptoms of PTSD, and found many that correspond to… Continue reading PTSD and The Road

I’m not entirely convinced that the ‘Black Hole of Trauma’ chapter relates directly to The Road, in the sense that the situation of the father and son figures of the novel is far more complex than that of the easy groupings of “people who undergo trauma and develop PTSD” and “people who undergo trauma and… Continue reading Trauma in “The Road”

While the father may have some signs of PTSD, I don’t think that the son has or will have any signs of it.  The mere fact that the boy was  born after the destruction of the world removes him from our current labels that we associate with different things.  Though he understands that things have… Continue reading Would it really be traumatic?