Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, use humor to address coping with tragedy. Foer’s experimental writing style and Jewish culture immersion in Everything is Illuminated and use of 9/11 as a background in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close have garnered both praise and criticism.
In the aftermath of major tragedies, it is often difficult for society to cope with the loss of loved ones or the aftermath of a disaster. Both of Jonathan Safran Foer’s highly regarded novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, address that need to cope and the intense sadness that comes with it, but Foer does so with an elegant touch of humor that allows the reader to heal together with the protagonists.
Born in Washington, DC and educated at Princeton University, Jonathan Safran Foer showed his promise as a gifted writer by winning Princeton’s creative writing thesis award in his freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years. He also won the Zoetrope: All Story Fiction Award in 2000. Not long after graduating from Princeton, Foer traveled to Ukraine to research his grandfather’s life, which led to the design of his first book, Everything is illuminated. It was with this book that Jonathan Safran Foer made his mark on the literary community with an experimental writing style and a new voice in the realm of modern fiction.
All is Illuminated largely follows the literary correspondence between the narrator, Alex, and the protagonist, Jonathan; because the narrator’s English is “not so excellent,” as Alex puts it, the correspondence is often intensely funny but also heartfelt and uncharacteristically sincere. Combined with a bizarre and often humorous outline of the history of the small village where Jonathan’s grandfather lived until the Nazi invasion, the novel combines the historical horror of the Holocaust and the brutality of the Nazis with the burgeoning intellectual rapport between the narrator and protagonist. The novel also immerses the reader in Jewish culture, bringing an otherwise dark world to the forefront of the reader’s mind.
In his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer has used similar elements to create an entirely different tale in the same humorous voice. His narrator, ten-year-old Oskar Schell, is also somewhat unreliable due to his age, despite his precociousness, but this also lends honesty and sincerity that an older narrator might not have been able to achieve. Jonathan Safran Foer this time chose the events of September 11, 2001 as the background of his narrative, as Oskar’s father dies in the attacks. Oskar finds a key among his father’s possessions and sets out on a journey – just like Jonathan in Everything Is Illuminated – to learn more about his father, who was taken from him before he had a chance to meet the man. Foer also interspersed the text with seemingly random photographs that acquire deeper meanings as the novel progresses, a technique both praised and belittled by critics. As in his first novel, Foer mixes different storylines throughout the novel.
While generally lauded by critics, Jonathan Safran Foer is not without his detractors. In the midst of intense praise for his debut novel, some critics felt that his writing was shoddy and silly, and not worthy of the literary praise he had received. Either way, Jonathan Safran Foer’s work had carved out a niche in the literary community as the product of a talented writer.
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