To Be Or Not To Be: Memory Writing In Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Jewish American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close recalls the 9/11 terrorist attacks from the perspective of a child,and describes the journey of the protagonist Oskar Schell looking for a lock in memory of his father.During this progress,Oskar walks into the history and the colorful life of others.Researches at home and abroad mostly analyze this novel on the basis of trauma theory,with little involvement of the memory writing in the text.Therefore,analyzing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close from the perspective of memory writing provides another path for understanding the text and brings some reflections on how humans should coexist in today’s society.This thesis analyzes how the author constructs memory in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by means of emotions and images and explores the survivals of the descendants of the victims of disastrous events.Firstly,with first-person narration,Foer represents the traumatic emotions of disaster-related people and reshapes their emotional memory of historical events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks.Secondly,Foer intersperses a lot of pictures in the novel to narrow the distance between the reader and the disasters in question through image narrative.In this way,the cruelty of the war is further demonstrated and people’s historical consciousness is effectively aroused.Thirdly,through memory writing,Foer shows that people should actively seek ways to survive so that they can return to normal life after disastrous events.Finally,this thesis argues that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close restores the historical memory of events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the bombing of Dresden by the narrative of emotions and images,pointing out the way to survive after disasters and calling on mankind to maintain world peace jointly in order to to build a community with a shared future.