A Traumatic Interpretation Of Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Born in 1977, Jonathan Safran Foer is a rising star in American contemporary literary world. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is his second book published in 2005. It is undoubtedly that one of the themes of this novel is trauma because characters, historical events and literary techniques in this novel all have a close relationship with trauma. Therefore, this thesis tries to interpret this novel’s traumatic characters, three layers of trauma and literary techniques from trauma theory to reach a deep insight of this novel’s theme -trauma.The first part of this thesis is an introduction to the author Jonathan Safran Foer, the plot of this novel, a literary review on this novel at home and abroad and trauma theory which will be used to analyze this novel. Chapter One focuses on three traumatic narrators’ traumatic experiences, symptoms and recovery results. Chapter Two tries to divide this novel’s trauma into three layers. They are cross-generational trauma in Oskar’s family, cross-borough trauma in New York City and cross-national trauma throughout the world. Chapter Three studies the relationship between trauma and literary techniques which include repetition, intertextuality and visual devices. Through using these techniques, the author, Foer makes unspeakable trauma speakable in this novel.In the conclusion, this thesis points out that through writing trauma, Foer encourages traumatic patients to go out of their traumatic experiences like the protagonist Oskar and expresses his deep concern on the globalization of trauma through Oksar’s quest. For Foer, the world is a big community. We human beings should eliminate the boundary of "self" and "others" and nothing could be the reason for us to wage wars.