Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Analysis

Improved Essays
When one thinks about the book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by a well-known author Jonathan Safran Foer, it is hard not to think of it as a story that shows courage and struggle. Of course, the courage it portrays is not the type of courage one thinks about at first. It is not about the courage one shows in a physically challenging situation, it is about the courage of living through the most heartbreaking experiences like the death of a loved one. The struggle portrayed in this book is a struggle of someone who cannot accept the unfair disappearance of someone extremely and almost painfully close to his heart.
This battle is the struggle faced by a young protagonist, Oscar Shell. His father died during the terrorist attack of 911. Extremely

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Why does Edmund Blunden imbue his memoir Undertones of War with irony? To understand the intent and extent of his stylistic choices, one has to understand the context of the work. Written following his experiences as a soldier during the First World War, Undertones of War was written as a recollection of Edmund Blunden’s personal experiences as a soldier. As a memoir, Blunden projects his own feelings and opinions into his writing, detailing both the emotions he felt in the moment of his experience as a soldier and those he felt while reflecting on the war. Instead a triumphant tale of heroism, the memoir is almost cynical and very down-to-earth, contradicting the uplifting genre of war writing which often seeks to put its heroes on god-like…

    • 942 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Courage is not something that is integrally human, especially in times of war when one’s life is at most risk. This time is when ones integrity is challenged the most: there are few who hope to preserve this integrity and their humanity through altruistic acts in times when kindness is a mirage. When most people’s foremost thoughts are of their self-preservation, altruism preserves and strengthens ones integrity and humanity when one risks their life for the survival of others and keeps their honor intact. In the novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, Canadian author Steven Galloway illustrates the internal moral crisis people face when confronted with their own mortality and the pain and suffering of those worse off. Galloway brilliantly demonstrates…

    • 361 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Laura Hillenbrand in her book unbroken, discusses the overall ideas of the human capacity to suffer and a spirits perseverance through suffering or hardship. Hillenbrand details Louie’s experience through world war 2. His perseverance through suffering shows perfectly the ideas of unbroken. Louie, through his entire experience of world war 2, receives more suffering than any person should have to experience in their lifetime.…

    • 356 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Synthesis Essay The novel “The Things They Carried” written by Tim O’Brien is a simple yet intriguing story about the items a troop of soldiers carried while stationed in Vietnam. Tim O’brien makes sure the story circles and centers around the horrible conditions of Vietnam. He also puts a voice in his writing so it seems like this topic was very difficult to write about. Throughout the story, O’brien seems to gain trust and courage in his writing and in his audience of young adults.. “The Things They Carried” describes the Vietnam experience and focuses on and prepares O’brien to discuss emotional issues and not just physical or environmental.…

    • 716 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    People will do anything and everything it takes to survive, and when confronted with a traumatic situation, people begin to think more about their own safety than the safety of others. With the approach of first-person narratives in both Night by Elie Wiesel and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, the reader can hear about and recount the events as they happened from the individual’s perspectives the way that those individuals experienced the events. In Night, where Elie recounts his experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust and a prisoner in multiple concentration camps, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, where Tim recounts his traumatic and life-changing time as a soldier in the Vietnam war, the reader is able to see events…

    • 1093 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Do you think that the way we grow up has a lasting effect on us? The things we go through and are surrounded by as children will shape our personality and how we deal with things? The underlying theme of these poems is a very deep and difficult subject to talk about, the breakage of a person and of a friendship. The way we deal with our past make us who we are, but how much can a person handle before they break? Stuart broke, Jackson was broken by Stuarts suicide attempt because he didn't know how to react to it, and these poems purpose an idea that we should handle suicide differently because, a suicide effects not only the person but the people around them, it breaks them.…

    • 703 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Boy At War Thesis

    • 401 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Harry Mazer's A Boy at War, published in 2001, recounts the experiences of fourteen-year-old Adam Pelko. Adam is a young man from a military family who lives in Hawaii in the days leading up to and during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It is just a matter of chance that Adam and two friends are fishing in a rowboat on the harbor on that fateful morning when the attack occurs. At first, the boys assume that they have been caught in a drill, but quickly realize that the planes and bombs are real. In the confusion following the initial onslaught, Adam helplessly witnesses the sinking of the Arizona, the ship on which his father is stationed.…

    • 401 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    It is always astounding to me how much a person can go through, still persevere, and survive. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel is a great example of this. Throughout the novel, Ivan Denisovich, a Russian Solder that has been wrongly accused of treason, is a prisoner of a Siberian labor camp. He must not only learn to survive on limited food, hard labor, and negative forty-degree weather, but he must learn to keep his identity in a place where the guards refer to him as a serial number, Shcha-854. In spite of this, he must learn to hold on to the little humanity he has left.…

    • 590 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The book is an indication of how similar tragic events can handled. The challenges will look similar. The victims are too traumatized to fight for their rights but Stern does it for them. The book is more of a legal thriller with a bold, young, heroic attorney taking on a big coal company to fight for the victims of a horrific disaster, the Buffalo Creek Flood.…

    • 2151 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Truth Lies Within The Story When faced with trauma, every individual reacts differently and chooses to express their emotions distinctly. This is especially evident in soldiers and how they deal with loss during wartime situations. In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explores different coping mechanisms for those in traumatic situations. O 'Brien explores the various ways with which soldiers cope with wartime experiences such as through social dependency , through denial and through storytelling in order to deepen one’s understanding the effectiveness of these coping mechanisms. He argues that the only true way to cope is by accepting the reality of the situation one is facing.…

    • 1151 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Within the writing of Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, he often uses the contradiction of topics or actions to emphasize their importance. He pairs ideas that are centralized around silence and speech to add value to what is said or not said and/or to emphasize the action associated with the silence or speech. O’Brien masters literary elements like mood and tense while portraying the contrast. Although this contrast is present throughout the book, it is most prominent in storylines included in “The Man I Killed”, “On the Rainy River”, and “Speaking of Courage.” The most prominent account in which O’Brien uses speech in contrast to silence to add value to the subject can be seen in the interaction between Kiowa, Tim, and the corpse…

    • 1161 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Crazy Brave is a memoir written by Native American poet and artist Joy Harjo. In this memoir Harjo recollects and evaluates a number of pivotal moments, which occur during her life, that altered her identity as well as how she saw the world around her. Many of these moments occur in the first two sections of the book entitled “East” and “West”. These moments include, but are not limited to, when she is playing with bees and is stung as a young girl, when her mother forces her to put on a shirt while playing outside with her brother, when she colors a ghost green in class, when her stepdad finds her personal diary and reads it in front of the rest of her family, as well as when her stepfather does not allow her to be involved with the school…

    • 1871 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Misael Barajas Argumentative Essay Have you ever felt like you have no luck? As if someone or something is detaining you from achieving your goals? Well, someone sure did, and its something you wouldn't want to experience. Well, today you are going to read about someone that was gone For over 20 years and he couldn't get to his home or to his family. Its something really scary to experience.…

    • 774 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Basement Humans are made for battle, some psychological, others more physical. We are born into a broken world where battles are what we know best, but they aren’t the only thing we know. We also have an undenying will to survive even though sometimes we fail to acknowledge its presence. The fact is, without survival there can’t be another battle. So one after the other, we continue to struggle through whatever life, or in some cases death, has to throw at us.…

    • 1047 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This person finds out how harsh reality can be and how this brutal life is having a catastrophic impact on this individual. Additionally, through imagery, the readers are able to visualize how this man who’s been having a cheerful dream suddenly gets waken up and reminded of the cold and wretched life he’s unfortunately living. Similarly In Night…

    • 932 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays