Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close stands out from the nationalistic-toned American “9/11 novels”. It depicts the story of a young boy and his grandparents who are left with the aftermath of losing a loved one in the attack on the twin towers. However, the complexity of the three main characters and the depth of their individual and common traumas make the novel go beyond the usual nationalistic 9/11 narrative and focus on the personal and, consequently, the national trauma.  This essay analyses the possibility of coping with and recovering from trauma through communication. Dominick LaCapra’s trauma theory notions of “working through” and “acting out”, as well as other traumatic memory research highlight the necessity of utterance in order to overcome trauma and to attempt an existence beyond it. In the instance of the three traumatized characters of the novel, the confessional language is entangled, broken and sometimes muted. This makes the recovery difficult in the case of the grandparents, almost impossible for the character of Grandpa. When it comes to the young boy, Oskar Schell, a more successful communication seems to open up the possibility of mental healing. These personal traumas are a reflection of a broader American trauma where an obsessive “rememoration” of the September 11 events and one-sided, revenge loaded public discourse do not seem to facilitate the national healing process. On all these levels, personal and community, the need and the difficult attempt to communicate the trauma of 9/11 does not necessarily grant recovery from it, but it facilitates a desired “working though” process.

This essay examines Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close through an application of a theoretical framework of trauma studies, aiming to showcase the elements of personal trauma displayed in the novel. Moreover, it wishes to discern the mental and physical sufferings and working through of the trauma through a thematic analysis aimed at the concepts of loss, vicarious trauma and isolation. The study’s results indicate that trauma is inexplicably linked to the individual, demonstrating that prior trauma has a substantial impact on how one deals with more recent trauma. They also suggest that it is impossible to distinguish between first-hand trauma and second-hand trauma, instead focusing on the term vicarious trauma to describe the elements of personal trauma in a better way. Although Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a work of fiction, this essay argues that it is valid in its portraying of trauma as it showcases the complex nature of trauma and its different aspects. In terms of the pedagogical implications of trauma, the essay suggests ways in which one can utilize and address fictional works in the Swedish EFL classroom supported by suggestions articulated by the Swedish National Agency for Education. It is done by raising students’ awareness for the elements of personal trauma, while at the same time improving their all-round communicative skills enabling them to discuss these issues at length.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-09T12:28:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2014-01-20Bitstream added on 2015-04-09T12:47:17Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000812898_20151231.pdf: 92770 bytes, checksum: 0df57f7179ed95ec8efbafd81fe6d5d8 (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2016-01-04T10:26:42Z: 000812898_20151231.pdf,. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2016-01-04T10:28:33Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000812898.pdf: 1511298 bytes, checksum: 9d02e9cf06fbfd1a1e72871704b47797 (MD5) / Este trabalho investiga as estratégias narrativas utilizadas por Jonathan Safran Foer no romance Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), a fim de verificar como o autor avalia o episódio dos ataques terroristas de 11 de setembro. A tragédia representa o início de um novo período da História dos Estados Unidos e tem sido tema de publicações em diversas áreas. Este estudo examina, por meio da jornada empreendida pelo menino Oskar, de apenas nove anos, cujo pai foi vítima dos atentados, a forma como os acontecimentos do passado são transformados em fatos históricos relevantes, os sistemas que permitem a abordagem da História por meio de várias perspectivas, e a presença do trauma como elemento de ligação entre História e Literatura. Focalizando primordialmente o narrador, o pequeno Oskar, a análise perseguirá sua jornada em Nova York à procura de respostas para a morte de seu pai naquele dia catastrófico, tratado por Oskar como the worst day. Serão também analisados os usos de imagens, espaços em branco, as escritas com sobreposição e o diálogo com a tecnologia e mensagens codificadas, como SMS, que estão presentes no romance. A fundamentação teórica desta discussão será baseada em textos de McHale (1992), Lyotard (1990), Jameson (2007), Santiago (2002), Connor (2000), White (1994), Le Goff (2003), e Hutcheon (1991) / This thesis investigates the narrative strategies used by Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) in order to verify how the author evaluates the episode of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The tragedy is the beginning of a new period in the history of the United States and has been the subject of publications in several fields. This study examines, through the journey taken by the nine-year-old boy Oskar, whose father was a victim of the 9/11 attacks, how the events of the past are transformed into relevant historical facts, systems that allow the treatment of History through multiple perspectives, and the presence of trauma as a conection between History and Literature. Primarily focusing on the narrator, little Oskar, the analysis will pursue his journey in New York looking for answers to the death of his father on that catastrophic day, treated by Oskar as “the worst day”. The use of images, blanks, written with overlapping and dialogue with technology and coded messages such as SMS, which are present in the novel, will also be analyzed. The theoretical basis of this discussion includes texts by McHale (1992), Lyotard (1990), Jameson (2007), Santiago (2002), Connor (2000), White (1994), Le Goff (2003) and Hutcheon (1991)

Al Qaeda killings, posttraumatic stress, and the Gothic together triangulate a sizable space in recent American fiction that is still largely uncharted by critics. This thesis maps that shared territory in four novels written between 2005 and 2007 by writers who were born in America, and whose protagonists are the survivors in New York City after the World Trade Center falls. Published in the city of their tragedy and reviewed in its media, the novels surveyed here include Don DeLillo’s _Falling Man_ (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s _The Writing on the Wall_ (2005), and Jess Walter’s _The Zero_ (2006). The thesis issues a challenge to the large number of negative and dismissive reviews of the novels under consideration, making a case that under different criteria, shaped by trauma theory and psychoanalysis, the novels succeed after all in making readers feel what it was to be alive in September 2001, enduring the posttraumatic stress for months and years later. The thesis asserts that 9/11 fiction is too commonly presented in popular journals and scholarly studies as an undifferentiated mass. In the same critical piece a journalist or an academic may evaluate narratives in which unfold a terrorist's point of view, a surviving or a dying New York City victim's perspective, and an outsider's reaction set thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. What this thesis argues for is a separation in study of the fictive strands that meditate on the burning towers, treating the New York City survivor story as a discrete body. Despite their being set in one of the most known cities of the Western world, and the terrorist attack that they depict being the most- watched catastrophe ever experienced in real-time before, these fictions have not yet been critically ordered. Charting the salient reappearing conflicts, unsettling descriptions, protagonist decay, and potent techniques for registering horror that resurface in this New York City 9/11 fiction, this thesis proposes and demonstrates how the peculiar and affecting Gothic tensions in the works can be further understood by trauma theory, a term coined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 72). Though the thesis concentrates on developments in trauma theory from the mid 1990s to 2015, it also addresses its theoretical antecedents: from the earliest voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked mental illness to a trauma (Charcot, Janet, Breuer, Freud), to researchers from mid-twentieth century (Adler, Lindemann) who studied how catastrophe affects civilian minds not previously trained to either fight war or withstand cataclysm. Always keeping at the fore the ancient Greek double-meaning of trauma as both unhealing “wound” and “defeat,” the thesis surveys tenets of the trauma theorists from the very first of those who studied the effects on civilian survivors of disaster (of what is still the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history, which replaced front page coverage of World War II for a few days: the Cocoanut Grove blaze in Boston, 1942) up to those theorists writing in 2015. The concepts evolving behind trauma theory, this thesis demonstrates, provide a useful mechanism to discuss the surprising yearnings hiding behind the appearance of doppelgängers, possession ghosts, terrorists as monsters, empty coffins, and visitants that appear to feed on characters’ sorrow, guilt, and loneliness within the novels under discussion. This thesis reappraises the dominant idea in trauma studies of the mid-1990s, namely that trauma victims often cannot fully remember and articulate their physical and psychic wounds. The argument here is that, true to the theories of the Caruthian school, the victims in these novels may not remember and express their trauma completely and in a linear fashion. However, the victims figured in these novels do relate the horrors of their memory to a degree by letting their narration erupt with the unexpectedly Gothic images, tropes, visions, language, and typical contradictions, aporias, lacunae, and paradoxes. The Gothic, one might say, becomes the language in which trauma speaks and articulates itself, albeit not always in the most cogent of signs. One might easily dismiss these fleeting Gothic presences that characters conjure in the fictions under consideration as anomalous apparitions signalling nothing. However, this thesis interrogates these ghostly traces of Gothicism to find what secrets they hold. Working from the insights of psychoanalysis and its post-Freudian re-inventers and challengers, it aims to puzzle out the dimensions of characters’ mourning in its “traumagothic” reading of the texts. Characters’ use of the Gothic becomes their way of remembering, a coded language to the curious. This thesis holds that unexpressed grief and guilt are the large constant in this grouping of novels. Characters’ grief articulation and guilt release, or the desire for symbolic amnesia, take paths that the figures often were suspicious of before 9/11: a return to organized religion, a belief in spirits, a call for vengeance, psychotherapy, substance abuse, splitting with a partner, rampant sex with nearby strangers, torture of suspects, and killing. All the earnest attempts through the above means by the characters to express grief, vent rage, and alleviate survivor guilt do so without noticeable success. True closure towards their trauma is largely a myth. No reliable evidence surfaces from the close reading of the texts that those affected by trauma ever fully recover. However, as this thesis demonstrates, other forms of recompense come from these searches for elusive peace and the nostalgic longing for the America that has been lost to them.