Examining the Intentionality of Signs in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Many literary purists may dismiss the photographs, colored markings and letter facsimiles of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as mere gimmicks–flashy pyrotechnics meant to catch the attention of lazy readers. But for the attentive reader these visual artifacts are props in creating the semiotic drama of Foer’s intention. Throughout the book, signs are interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted. Signs that are meant to signify meaning lose their original meanings while signs that weren’t meant to mean anything are suddenly imbued with meaning. Foer perhaps wishes to ask: What is a sign? How does a seemingly senseless thing get transformed into a meaningful thing, and how does a meaningful thing lose its meaning, particularly through the process of mourning?

1. Oskar, the nine year old narrator of the novel, uses the internet to research information and collect interesting images that he saves in a folder called “Stuff That Happened to Me” (pp. 53-67).

When we first encounter this photograph of astronaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré in Oskar’s folder, we think: “This is just a picture of an astronaut.” Some of us might think: “This is a picture of Jean-Pierre.” But what does it mean to Oskar and why is this photograph in a collection entitled “Stuff that Happened to Me”? We quickly understand that Oskar is really upset about his dad dying, his dad who fell out of the World Trade Center building on 9/11.

At this point we think back to the photograph, and we realize that the photograph represents Oskar’s fantasy of a gravity-free world, where people, or, not even just people, but heroes, are rendered immortal because they can’t ever die from falling. As Oskar grows older, matures, begins to see things more clearly, he tells us that “gravity isn’t only what makes us fall, it’s what makes our muscles strong.” The photograph of Jean-Pierre which we had taken all along to be the portrait of a superman, is actually the portrait of an enfeebled man who could barely walk on earth, whose muscles had so atrophied during his time in space that his legs had become little sticks.

2. Another image that comes up is the facsimiles of the marker test pads at the art store. After finding the key in his father’s closet, Oskar goes on a search to figure out what “Black” is supposed to signify. The manager of the art store picks up some clues and reasons that since the word “Black” is written in red ink and capitalized, it might signify a name rather than a color. To prove her point, the manager shows Oskar pads of paper that are used to test out colored markers. Among the mass of scribbles, we see the name of Oskar’s father, “Thomas Schell.”

As words are already stand-ins for a presence that is no longer around, the appearance of “Thomas Schell” is eerie, almost like a posthumous message. “Thomas Schell” in an ordinary context would be as meaningless as the other scribbles on the marker-testing notepad, but to Oskar, it is as if his father has called him from beyond the grave. In this case, the referential function of language is unknown—we can’t say certainly if Oskar’s father wrote his name as a “clue” to Oskar, or if he was doing it just to test markers. If the latter is true, this kind of message isn’t meant to be communicative at all.

3. Contrary to this example, where a meaningless symbol becomes meaningful, is Foer’s characterization of Oskar’s grandfather’s loss of speech. The grandfather gradually loses speech a word at a time until he has so few words in his vocabulary that he ends up having to say statements that don’t mean anything. “ ‘I’ was the last word I was able to speak aloud,” he says, “I would walk around the neighborhood saying, ‘I I I I.’ ” His last word “I” is reduced from being a signifier of the personal self, to a phonetic syllable, to a cipher, a mere symbol of speech.

Although the grandfather writes, “my silence was complete,” we get a sense that his silence is an unhealthy way of coping with trauma. We are invited to look at the tower-like cipher “I” and think: whatever the cipher was supposed to signify, it is gone now. Is it better to forget it? Should we insist on remembering? What is problematic about the grandfather’s silence?

The persistent transformation of signs is a set-up to make an allegorical connection to how America as a nation has dealt with the catastrophic events of 9/11. When the first plane struck the World Trade Center, no one had any idea what the attack was supposed to signify. Was it an act of terrorism? A declaration of war? A sign that all Arabs are inherently dangerous people? 9/11 attracted multiple meanings and explanations, yet, nine years and two wars later, the reasons behind the attack (both political and spiritual) are still nebulous. Victims to trauma perhaps find themselves asking, “Why did it happen and why me?”

The search for meaning becomes a potentially bottomless and futile task that they find themselves performing anyway. Oskar laments: “The dots from where I’d found things looked like the stars in the universe…I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make “cyborg,” and “platypus,” and “boobs,” and even “Oskar”…I could connect them to make almost anything I wanted, which meant I wasn’t getting closer to anything. And now I’ll never know what I was supposed to find.” Yet, at the very end of the novel, after Oskar has dug up his father’s grave and opened his empty coffin, we are presented with the image of a starry sky, which isn’t meant to be anything other than a starry sky. For a moment, the universe just is, and it suffices to comfort both Oskar and the reader.