Trauma And Loss:a Text World Approach To Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977-) is considered as one of the most promising contemporary American writers. He is included in Crania’s Best of Young American Novelists and in The New Yorkers “20 under 40” list. His works are acclaimed for the diversified themes, bold narrative experiments, and the unique perspectives, especially his second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). This book has its own special form and juxtaposes the background of September 11 terrorist attacks and the backdrop of the Bombings of Dresden. It narrates Oskar Schell’s experience for meeting different Mr. Blacks one-year after his father’s death in 9/11, and narrates Oskar’s grandparents’ sufferings from the Bombings and their immigration into America. The story-lines of Oskar’s, Grandpa’s and Grandma’s alternatively appear, contributing to the picture of Schells’trauma and loss.Based on the Text World Theory, this thesis mainly explores the construct of trauma and loss of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in readers’mind. Text World Theory divides the world into discourse world, text world and sub-world. Discourse world deals with the immediate situation, text world relates to states of affairs from the memory and imagination of discourse participants, and sub-world is the departure from the text world. The thesis is unfolded from five parts:Introduction part briefly gives an overall description of Jonathan Safran Foer and his novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Literature review mainly summaries western and domestic research on the novel and discovers that Text World Theory is a suitable model for this novel, whose stylistic research is relatively scanty. Third, the theoretical background or analytic framework is given. Then, the body part discusses the text worlds from three first-person narrators. Oskar’s text worlds are featured by his fantasies, Grandpa’s by his silence, and Grandma’s by her blindness. In addition, narrators’text worlds are often interpreted by their imaginations, memories or other events. Therefore, to construct narrators’text worlds, readers need to consider the relationship between Jonathan Foer and the creation of this novel, thread narrators’ respective text worlds into a coherent line and recognize the departures from narrators’ dominant text worlds, so that they can well understand narrators’ inner worlds and the theme of this novel. Finally, it is concluded that Text World Theory makes readers actively involved in the world of this novel, interprets how trauma and loss themes are generated in readers’ mind from three layers of the world, and broadens the application of this theory in such an unconventional text.