The two adjectives which certainly can be used when one describes father-son relationship within the novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” are the words “unusual” and “complicated”. In fact, one may mention two examples of father-son relationship in this novel: the relationship between Thomas Shell Sr(referred to as Grandpa) and his son Thomas Shell Jr. and the relationship between Thomas Shell Jr and his son Oskar who narrates most of the story. In both cases the relationship was developing on rather tragic background. Because of this they were notably strange, as the characters had to deal with life difficulties to which society never can prepare. One is never taught what to do in order to recover from the deaths of his or her beloved ones. Of course such general recommendations as to “let it go” or “to forget the past and leave in the present” are well-known to everybody. However in real life it is not so easy to follow them. People that are stricken by such a grief have to find their own ways of recovery while their minds search for any possible ways of psychological defense. As a vivid example one may take the case of Thomas Shell Sr. who lost his voice when his girlfriend Anna died in the bombing of Dresden. The grief was so overwhelming that his brain worked in order to clear the memory of all possible reminders of the tragedy and he gradually started to lose the ability to pronounce the words connected with his love – first the name “Anna”, then words that sounded like “Anna” and then as the process became inconvertible he lost the ability to speak itself.
Thomas Shell Sr. in fact started a chain of complicated father-son relationship in the family. He never spoke to his son, Thomas Shell Jr., even though he knew that he existed. He left his mother (referred in the novel as Grandma) almost immediately after she had informed him of her pregnancy. What was strange about his behavior was the fact that he was actually not indifferent towards his son. One may support this by the evidence that he wrote letters to his son in which he told him about his life, his grief, his relationship with Anna and his relationship with the mother of the child who finally turned out to be Anna’s sister. Therefore the existence of son meant something to him and he had a need to share something with him. Thomas Shell Sr. says: “Every day I write a letter to you. Sometimes I think if I could tell you what happened to me that night, I could leave that night behind me, maybe I could come home to you, but that night has no beginning or end, it started before I was born and it’s still happening”(Foer, 208). It is strange that he did not want to talk to his son face-to-face or live with him, even though he did care about him as it was mentioned previously. Perhaps he thought that his son would not understand a lot of what he had to say to him, because he did not participate in the events of World War II and could only imagine how a person who loses his or her beloved ones all of a sudden feels. He ends his complicated relationship with his son by burying all the letters he ever wrote to him in his empty coffin.
Thomas Shell Jr. also started rather strange and unusual relationship with his son Oskar though on the contrary to his father he did not do it consciously. When alive he was a typical good father, very protective and caring who was on good terms with his son. Oskar had an opportunity to communicate with his father and one may say that up to the age of nine he was quite a happy boy who was not different from other happy boys of his age living in complete family with father and mother. Still, when his father died during the attack of World Trade Center on the 11th of September, the boy’s life changed dramatically. A little child had to deal very with the death of a very important person in his life and for such a young creature it was extremely difficult. He was frightened to listen to the voice of his father on the answering machine as it was a living reminder of a person who was already dead. Finally as he found an envelope with a key which as he supposed had belonged to his father he started trying to find a person to whom that key belonged. In this behavior one may observe the desire to prolong the relationship with the person who was already dead. It seems that in the depth of his heart Oskar imagined that father gave him the task to find out to whom the key belonged and this was one of the reasons why such a small child was so persistent in rather a difficult search. Oskar also mentioned that he did not want to let the third person, in his case his mother, to participate in the quest: “I can’t explain why but I was sure that she didn’t know about the vase, the envelope or the key. The lock was between me and Dad” (Foer, 52).
The father-son relationships that the story depicts are closely connected with rather a grim side of life: how one copes sometimes with the loss of the beloved people. That is why although the novel is rather sad due to the fact that it refers to lots of tragic events it is still worth reading and provides a lot of material to ponder on.
Works Cited
Foer, Johnatan. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Mariner Books, 2011. Print
