Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Essay Example

Visual Means in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” as a Way to Reach the Audience “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer is an outcome of postmodern literature, and like many pieces created during postmodernism, this novel bears features peculiar only to this very period. More specifically, the novel by Foer is characterized by fragmentation, which means that the piece is, in fact, a combination of themes, story lines, characters, facts, and imagery that are scattered throughout the body of the novel. The second characteristic feature of the piece is syncretism, which is the combination of completely different genres and / or art forms in the novel. In particular, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer appears to be the fusion of text and visual aids. As it is a literary work, text plays the leading role in rendering the ideas, while visual aids perform the supporting role and enhance the story telling by means of specifying and illustrating the narration. In accordance with McCloud, text and pictures interrelate in several ways in a piece. Despite the fact that McCloud discusses mostly graphic novels, or comics, his ideas can be applied to the novel under consideration as well. Based on McCloud’s work titled “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art”, there are two types of text and photo combinations in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, such as word specific combination and additive combination. The first type of text and photo combination presupposes that pictures mostly illustrate what is discussed in the novel. One of the best examples of the use of photos in terms of illustrations is Oskar’s visit to the art supply store where the boy sees his father’s name (actually his grandfather’s name) written on the writing pads. The photos of writing pads are placed in the novel to illustrate that “most people write the name of the color of the pen they’re writing with” and back up the manager’s words (Foer). Apart from that, these photos reveal no information. The second example is Oskar’s scrap book “Stuff That Happened to Me”. For the boy, the book is of great importance for it bears valuable memories. Put exactly in this part of the novel, however, the scrap book can be regarded as the illustration of what is happening in Oskar’s head at a particular moment in bed at night. “Stuff That Happened to Me” is the montage of photos (keys, Oskar’s fingerprints, Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull etc.) which reflects the welter of confused ideas and the boy’s state of perplexity at that very moment. The photos of bridges, doors and buildings Oskar sees while looking for Black are also illustrations for they show the world in the boy’s perspective. Overall, such type of relationship between text and pictures help the reader visualize what the character sees, says of thinks of. The second way text and visual aids interrelate in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is additive combination. In this type of text and photo combination, pictures elaborate or amplify on words or vice versa (McCloud). Perhaps, the most powerful additive combination in the entire novel is a set of pictures placed in the very end of the piece. These pictures are the photos of a man falling from one of the Towers of the World Trade Center. The photos are organized in a form of a flip book and create an illusion of motion. There are fifteen photos in this book; they are put in the correct order but depict the backwards motion so that the person seems to fly up. This set of photos amplifies the words said by Oskar in the very end of the novel. On the last pages of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, the boy describes the events that precede the tragedy in the reverse sequence starting from the messages left by his Dad. Oskar finishes his internal monologue saying, “We would have been safe” (Foer). The set of pictures creates an encouraging and heart-lifting and at the same time mournful mood and amplifies Oskar’s grief. While reading and analyzing “Extremely Loud ad Incredibly Close”, there was set the task to define how the author renders the ideas with the use of the combination of text and images. In other words, the task was to study the ways in which the text itself and photos scattered throughout it interrelate and the roles such combinations of words and pictures play in rendering the thoughts of the characters. In other words, the main attempt was to get the understanding of the author’s reasoning in placing photos. Before working with the novel, the chapter of McCloud’s work was read and studied to know what part of the text deserved particular attention. After doing this, reading the novel and making some notes, the relationship between words and pictures became clear. The last thing left to do was to classify the instances of words and pictures combinations in accordance to McCloud and pick out the most interesting ones. It was quite interesting to analyze the body of the novel knowing what to look for. In addition to this, after rereading the piece – this was the second time I read it – now I understand the author’s motivation to put those particular pictures where they are as some cases were not clear at first. The article by McCloud appeared to be very helpful due to the fact it presented me with the theoretical background on the issue and, in fact, made the work much easier. Overall, I enjoyed the process of analysis because it showed me the novel from the completely different side. All the photos placed throughout the novel are selected very carefully. In the majority of cases, they are aimed at illustrating the events that take place in the piece and show the world through the characters’ eyes, and amplify what is described in the text. In the course of the analysis, it has been drawn the conclusion that the author of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” uses the photos and creates, perhaps, the brand new combination of text and visual aids to make the reader get filled and inspired with the ideas expressed in the novel. Due to the wide use of pictures scattered throughout the body of the piece, Jonathan Safran Foer creates a reality for the audience and makes the characters of the novel a part of this reality; he helps the reader understand the characters’ thoughts, motives, feelings and emotion to a greater degree than the bare text allows. Works Cited: Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Boston: Houghton Miffl, 2006. Print. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993. Print. Read More