Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

In a letter from Oskar’s grandfather to his son, Thomas, Oskar’s grandfather outlines the story of how he lost the ability to speak and how he met Thomas’s mother. During his first meal in America, he forgot the name of someone he loved. After that, words began to disappear one by one from his memory. At first he was able to adjust by replacing them with longer phrases. When this became too limiting, he tattooed the words “YES” and “NO” on his palms. He notes, “Every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one” (17). He writes of how he lost the inspiration to sculpt at the same time that he lost Anna, the only person he ever loved. Eventually, the last word he could speak was “I,” and when that was lost, he began writing all his responses in books. These books filled up daily and thus began to fill his life. A picture of a key in a lock breaks up the letter. Below the picture, Thomas Sr. recounts how a woman approached him and spoke to him for several minutes, saying she understood him and what he had been through. All he could do was write, “I don’t speak. I’m sorry” (30). This caused her to burst into tears, but then she wrote, “Please marry me” (32), and pointed to it several times, as if desperate for something to grasp. Thomas Sr. pointed to the word “Help” (34).

Oskar describes the significance of the bracelet he made for his mother. He turned his father’s last voicemail into morse code and then turned that morse code into a pattern of beads and strings. His mother said it was the best gift she ever received. Oskar is bothered by the fact that his mother has met a new man, named Ron, with whom she seems to be spending more and more time. She seems no longer to be mourning her husband, and Oskar imagines a Reservoir of Tears that all the grieving people pour their tears into—a reservoir which his mother is ignoring. One night while Ron is over, Oskar decides to go into his father’s closet for the first time since his death a year ago. Oskar touches his dad’s clothes, smells the room, and thinks about how none of it will be used by his father ever again. When he spots a blue vase on the top shelf, he stacks a chair and some books to reach it, but he and the vase come crashing down. Oskar bruises himself in the crash, and it upsets him that his mother seems too distracted by Ron to notice. Within the mess, Oskar finds a tiny envelope with a “fat and short” (37) key inside. Startled, he wonders what it could be for, but upon trying every door in the house, he is no closer to finding the answer.

The next day, Oskar pretends to be sick so he can sneak out and go talk to a locksmith. The man there tells him the key appears to be for a lockbox or safe of some kind. After a long series of questions about the locksmith’s work, Oskar returns home with this new information and calculates that there are at least “162 million locks” (41) in New York City, and it would thus be virtually impossible to try them all. He notices the word “Black” written on the back of the envelope and bruises himself again for missing it before. He bruises himself frequently—whenever he feels angry with himself and whenever he feels depressed, a feeling he describes at numerous points as “wearing heavy boots.”

The next day, Oskar lies to his mother and tells her he’s feeling too sad about the state of the world to go to school, listing dozens of reasons for his feelings. His mother encourages him to go to school but does not force him, and Oskar sneaks out again, this time to visit an art-supply store and ask about the writing on the envelope. The woman there notices that the word “Black” is written in red ink, and she shows Oskar a piece of paper where people test pens. This piece of paper is visually represented in the novel. The woman at the art store points out that most people write the color of the pen they are using, so there might be a reason for the lack of correspondence in this case. When people don’t write the name of the color, they usually write their name, so the woman reasons that Black might be someone’s name. Looking at the sheets of paper, Oskar spots his father’s name, Thomas Schell, on one of them. He looks around the store and finds his name on testing pads all over the place. Confused, knowing that his dad did not usually buy art supplies, he goes home and finds out there are 472 people with the surname Black in New York. Oskar writes a fake letter to his French tutor from his mother explaining that he will no longer be coming to lessons on Sundays. He plans to spend every weekend for the next year and a half meeting everyone named Black. Oskar wants to ask each of them what they know about the key. His mother seems less than curious about where he goes every weekend, which makes Oskar feel “a little heavier” (52) despite feeling better the closer he gets to finding the truth. He spends the night looking through his scrapbook, titled “Stuff that Happened to Me” (52). Several pages from the scrapbook are reproduced in the novel, including photographs Oskar took with his grandfather’s camera of a wall of keys, the folds for a paper airplane, two turtles mating, and a tin of gems. Also in the scrapbook are a photograph of a man plunging from the World Trade Center on September 11, a photograph of Manhattan with Central Park whited out, and then a zoomed-in photograph of the same man. The next few pages are the word “Purple” written in green, a tennis player, a set of handprints, two human-like apes walking upright together, and an astronaut.

For the first time since his father died, Oskar takes out the old family phone that contains his father’s last voicemail messages from the day of the attacks. Oskar hid and replaced the phone on September 11, rushing to the nearest Radio Shack to buy the same phone and protect his mother from hearing the messages. He listens to the second of five, in which his father assures his family he will be okay. Oskar bruises himself afterward and then calls his grandmother on their walkie-talkies. Oskar’s grandmother lives across the street, and they look at each other as they talk. Oskar asks a series of random questions and then talks about his wish for pockets to be much larger, but his grandmother knows something is wrong, so he admits that he’s missing his dad, and his grandmother says that she does too. Oskar’s grandmother tells him about his grandfather, who was a sculptor, and Oskar asks if she is sad that his grandfather left. Afterward, Oskar puts the key on a string so he can wear it around his neck. He coaxes himself to sleep with French conjugations.