ABSTRACT
Foregrounding Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), this chapter analyses the intersections between a child’s lived world and post-9/11 melancholia from the theoretical lens of trauma studies. The novel, a postmodern bildungsroman, represents the young Oskar’s quest that is triggered by the trauma and guilt for not having answered his father’s last call on the morning of 9/11. By thinking about the world through a child’s storytelling, puzzles, games and visuals, Foer subverts the privileging of rational analysis over the illogical contrivances and mechanisms for coping with melancholia, loss and tragedy. Examining the memorialization of Oskar’s loss, it will be my effort to map out trauma as a structuring yet elusive subject of representation by exploring the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.
