| Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,one masterpiece of Jewish American writer Jonatahn Safran Foer,set in the 9/11 event and inserted with the bombing of Dresden in World War II,describes the characters represented by the Schell family suffer from collective psychological trauma and shows how these characters deal with the traumatic aftermath after catastrophic events.In the novel,there are lots of descriptions related to nothingness in the novel.Besides blank pages,pages full of random numbers and pages of words covered by words,and various weird behaviors or states of characters are related to nothingness.For example,Grandpa and Grandma try to empty their past thoroughly to keep a state of nothingness after their trauma;the group represented by Mr.Blake is afraid of loneliness and nothingness,and they try to fill out their lives by self-deception;Oskar is a combination of these two types,and in the one hand,he escapes everything related to his father,but in the other hand,he tries to fill out the life without his father through looking for the lock.However,seen from the studies at home and abroad,they mainly analyze the novel from trauma themes,trauma narrative,trauma memory based on trauma theory,or analyze pursuit theme,history writing,and writhing techniques,and so on,none of which refers to nothingness in the novel.Thus,in combination with trauma theory and Sartre’s existentialist view,the thesis will start an in-depth study of nothingness with the nothingness of behaviors in the individual level and the collective level to probe into their nothingness of consciousness,aiming to provide a new perspective for the research on and the interpretation of the novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,and to broaden the research dimension of the novel,and trying to enrich methods of trauma studies and even literary studies.This thesis contains four main chapters,the introduction and the conclusion.The introduction gives a brief description of Jonathan Safran Foer and the plot of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,reviews the history and present situation of researches on Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close at home and abroad and puts forward the central argument,research methods and significance of the thesis.Chapter One introduces trauma theory and Sartre’s nothingness,through whichilluminates the relationship between the concept of nothingness in the novel and both of them.Chapter Two classifies and analyzes the representations of nothingness in the novel,including individual level and collective level.Chapter three analyzes the two causes of nothingness: one is the lose of the loved ones;the other is the collapse of faith and ideal,both of which cause the nothingness of consciousness and the nothingness of behavior.Chapter Four mainly discusses the responses of characters to nothingness,including confronting and relieving the past experience repeatedly and escaping into the self-closed and self-deceiving world.The conclusion summarizes and generalizes the whole thesis. |
