Oskar Schell's consultation with Dr. Great, extremely loud and incredibly close The Literature of 9/11 (2023)

Haus>near readings> already being considered: advice from Oskar Schell to Dr. Fine, extremely strong and incredibly close

did you consider: Consultation of Oskar Schell with Dr. Fine

von Jonathan Safran FoerExtremely loud and incredibly close, P. 203-205*

A central thematic element in the circulatory system of Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novelExtremely loud and incredibly close, the collective role of inversions, paradoxes and binaries emerge at the levels of the external narrative and the internal language of the text to open a border space for character and reader in which both characters can negotiate their respective psychological wounds. Especially with the character Oskar Schell, the main narrator of the nine-year-old novel, reversals, paradoxes and binaries are not only embedded in the perception of his post-9/11 reality, but also central pillars. Language with which he addresses himself and others. In addition, in connection with Oskar's sensitivity to these dualities, more in-depth investigations arise, which deal, among other things, with how exactly these splits work: what they can offer the traumatized psyche and how urgent threshold spaces can influence creation - also on a linguistic level How on On the level of the imagination, the last question here becomes a point that was specific to Oskar in one of his sessions with his therapist, Dr. Howard Fein.

Throughout the novel, Oskar makes regular reference to his encounters with Fein, but it is their encounter and Oskar's subsequent overhearing of his mother's conversation with Dr. Fine, that spoils a unique and revealing moment for the novel. Paradoxes and binary numbers in novels. In an attempt to break Oskar's hyper-vigilant consciousness, Fein tries to play a quick word association game with his patient to get at his buried subconscious. Oskar isn't amused by the game, nor does it offer any of the usual responses that this game often evokes, but takes every one-word message into a very literal connection; However, the game evokes a temporary massive reverse cleansing of traumatized memories and emotions in Oskar as his buried subconscious is exhumed to herald a second funeral. As Oskar prepares to leave, he throws it offfakewith guarantees in every way that it will beparts list, opened. "'I'm going to bury my feelings inside myself,'" he says (203). "'No matter how sorry I am,'" he comments to Fein's dismay, "'I won't miss it,'" a resolution that then sets off a surreal chain of twists for Oskar, a series of paradoxes in he built is a bespoke ensemble of encrypted binaries that he designed and organized for himself after his father's death. "'If I have to cry, I'll cry inside,'" he says, beginning the sequence with conditional cause-and-effect language structures. "When I have to bleed," he continues, "I get hurt," external physical realities are turned inside out and taken out of the body to locate their intravenous emotional counterparts. "'If my heart starts going crazy, I won't tell anyone in the world,'" says Oskar, a comment that alludes to one of his many stereotypical binaries about the word "crazy," his preoccupation with volume as well. his previous preoccupation with the quantitative extent of his feelings and his need to bury them. "He doesn't help at all," he then states, which is where his polar equations for "help" come into play: "help" = take care of other people and "not help" = take care of yourself. Oskar further confirms this idea in his commentary: "'It only makes everyone's life worse,'" an extreme notion painfully eclipsed by the notion of "everyone's life," not "everyone's life."Life', an error that metaphysically and linguistically reveals the fact that Oskar's world is divided into two bodies: his and his.from all. This is where the text begins to illustrate how Oskar should gosomeoneto disappoint a life is to leaveatdown and save failsa bodyis the lack of savingsat— a failure that translates for Oskar as his failure to save his father, an all-or-nothing epistemology not unlike his grandmother's comment: "'The story of my life is the story of everyone I do ever known.'” . (130). ).

At this point, Oskar's inversions are silently broken, as Dr. Fein returns with a series of questions aimed at approaching him on an ontological level, to find out how "you" or "me" Oskar will be when he buries his world. under. his outside world and finally force the death of Oskar's father. "Do you think anything good can come of your father's death?" Fein asks, a question that directly addresses the liminal, empty space between all of Oskar's binaries. "I think someparts listCould it come from my father's death?'” Oskar repeats, his attention fixed on the idea of ​​'good', an idea for him with no possible counterpart or precursor, an idea whose binary partner is 'evil'. and “bad” for Oskar is always synonymous with “death of father”. The equation in the question just doesn't calculate for this; it breaks your code, breaks your binaries, nullifies your paradoxes, and cancels your investments. "You thinkanyCan anything good come from your father's death? Fein repeats, this time using the keyword "whatever", an attempt to break through Oskar's system and force him to examine the space between the epistemological poles that he has set for signs of the good. It is also a recurring idea - a double, a clone, a copy - that violates Oskar's 1:1 comparison with reality and evokes in Oskar a momentary ontological decay, a moment in which Oskar develops a situation in which his head, a scene resembling a dream rehearsal for a survival situation but depicting a different one; it is a time when both realities are real reality in relation to their respective inverted dimensions. "I knocked over my chair, threw his papers on the floor," says Oskar, "and yelled, 'No! Of course not, you bloody idiot!' as part of his personal manifesto of hidden expression. The explosion is an extroversion, both conceptually and linguistically as well, from all the inversions we have just outlined to the flat exclamatory syntax and use of profanity he so carefully never utters, a diction that, in that capacity, is a species forbidden word spell acts the release of his buried emotion. That reality aside: "That's what I wanted to do," Oskar comments, tearing himself out of the gap in his head to get to the beginning of the sequence and start over, an act of revision akin to the flip book he then pulls out created in the image of the "falling man."

While there is a continuous story arc at this point, as Oskar retreats to the living room to switch places with his mother, there was a break in his binary system, a break with his coded thinking and what's next for him. , which had this experience, is unique because of its fragmented language, the white space on the page, and the photographic image. The stethoscope against the door of Dr. Fine, Oskar can overhear parts of the adult conversation. "I couldn't hear much and sometimes I wasn't sure if nobody was speaking," he says, "or if I just wasn't listening to what they were saying." In that sense, Oskar is all about noting quantity, loudness and quantity, but he does not realize that the speech he hears is partially erased by the door, nor does he fully realize that it contains the meaning of what he hears. obscured Furthermore, in a space recently plagued by the cracks in his dual thinking, the broken and erased language is shown as a whole, and the meaning, although fragmented, is translated as a whole, even if presented as fragments of text on the page becomes. Furthermore, when read aloud, the page that follows Oscar's outburst reads as a coherent stream of thought as it dictates from Oscar's point of view and within his point of view the 'broken' parts of its inversions, paradoxes and binaries. "I want to talk," hears Oskar and falls into the muffled white space where speech emerges, "that won't be easy" (204). The translation here, for example: "Talking will not be easy". The difficulty isn't necessarily talking to a specific person about something specific; The difficulty, as Oskar understands here, is verbal communication, an idea that makes sense because for him speakingesstiff, her language, at this point in the text, hovering in a border area between the extremes, insecure from the inside out, crazy-healthy, good-evil, from top to bottom - her thoughts wander on the side to refine her imaginary understanding of language, as well as his orientations in reality, in the body of the figure in the image of the falling man, the last words of the page, "have you considered", correspond to the image of the Falling Man within a vertical/horizontal reading scheme, a semiotics of patterns that, among other things own ideas suggests, "have you considered [liminality]".

did you consider

**

*See “References 11-S”Extremely loud and incredibly close

Link to discussion question: The role of inversions, paradoxes and binaries

In her interview with Deborah Solomon, Foer talks about itExtremely loud and incredibly close, "Every relationship in the book is based on silence and distance... Extremely loud and incredibly close is what two people are not together," a statement that indirectly echoes Don DeLillo's assertion in In the Ruins of the Future. . that "the author seeks to bring delicacy of memory and meaning to all this howling space." What we see here is the distorted relationship between the powerful properties at play in inversions and paradoxes and also the creative power available in a traumatized void, a blank canvas: the “nothing” space of Marco Zero for example. With that in mind, the oddity here is: why invest at all? Why the paradoxes? Besides, why should binary systems (not unlike those established inExtremely loud and incredibly close– “YES/NO”, “SOMETHING/NOT”, “OK/[NOT OK]”) so necessary to negotiate these spaces?

**The exact image of 205 is not available but the reference is the same; this image from the flip book at the end of the novel