57 pages • 1 hour read
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Heavy Boots Heavier Boots”
Oskar’s school is putting on a performance of Hamlet, and Oskar has been cast as the skull of Yorick. All he has to do is stand in a skull costume while his classmate, Jimmy Snyder, who plays Hamlet, holds his chin and laments the loss of his friend. The play goes on for several nights, and on the first night, Oskar’s family and many of the people named Black whom he has met are there. Each night, fewer people appear, and on the final night Oskar looks out and sees only his grandmother. He imagines taking off the skull mask and insulting Jimmy Snyder for bullying others, and then using the skull to “smash it against Jimmy Snyder’s head” (146). He thinks about how nothing makes sense and wonders if there is a point to struggling through life at all. In reality, he stands in silence and lets Jimmy perform his lines. He looks out and sees Abe Black, whom he met a couple months before as part of his quest to interview everyone in New York with the surname Black. Oskar met Abe in Coney Island, where Abe convinced him to ride a rollercoaster. He then took Oskar to meet the next Black on his list: Ada Black. Ada was an extremely wealthy woman whose egalitarian values were at odds with her lavish lifestyle. She scolded Oskar when he complimented her maid’s uniform, noting how condescending he sounded. She then paid for Oskar’s cab, and Oskar’s final stop for the day was in his own building.
Oskar went up to the sixth floor and found the correct apartment. An elderly man answered the door in a jovial mood and introduced himself as Mr. Black. He invited Oskar inside, and Oskar was amazed to see how full of things Mr. Black’s apartment was. Mr. Black talked and talked, telling Oskar that he had lived through the entire 20th century and many wars, as well as traveled the world. The objects in his home were from his travels. He also kept an enormous drawer full of cards with the names of people he had learned about in his life. Oskar hoped that his dad’s name would be inside, but it was not, and Mr. Black didn’t know about the key, either. Oskar looked around Mr. Black’s apartment and marveled at his bed made from a tree, his wall of masks, and much more. Mr. Black confessed that he had spent most of his life away from his wife and in war, but eventually made the decision to be at home with her. Since she died, he had hammered a nail into his bed every day. The bed was also magnetic and pulled Oskar’s key toward it. Mr. Black also explained that he hadn’t left home in 20 years; instead, he had everything delivered to him. Hearing all of this saddened Oskar deeply, and Oskar decided to help Mr. Black feel less lonely by inviting him on his mission. Mr. Black seemed hesitant at first, but then Oskar realized it was because he could not hear. Mr. Black said that he hadn’t turned his hearing aids on for years, but he allowed Oskar to do so. There was silence around until a flock of birds passed the window, and hearing it caused Mr. Black to cry. He walked around his house listening to all the machinery. Oskar realized he had to go but asked again if Mr. Black would like to join him next weekend, and Mr. Black agreed.
At bedtime after the performance of Hamlet, Oskar is thinking about his own death and asks his mother to put him in a mausoleum when he dies, as he fears being buried. Oskar’s mother tries to comfort him and tells him not to think about death, but Oskar can’t help it, and he asks repeatedly not to be buried. The conversation then shifts slightly as Oskar thinks about his dad and expresses his anger at his dad’s empty coffin. He sees it as a pointless gesture. He also blames his mother for not doing more the day his dad died, and this anger mounts until Oskar belts out, “If I could have chosen, I would have chosen you!” (171). He makes this statement out of anger and fear, but Oskar’s mother is hurt nevertheless and leaves the room. She stands on the other side of the door as Oskar tries to take it back. The next thing Oskar remembers, his mother is helping him change into his pajamas, which means she would have noticed his 41 bruises, but she says nothing about them.
Chapter 8 Summary: “My Feelings”
In a letter to Oskar, Oskar’s grandmother details her relationship with her husband, Oskar’s grandfather. It is the same story he told, but from her perspective. She describes the same nothingness in the relationship and admits to pretending to write a book and feigning partial blindness. Oskar’s grandmother describes how she became pregnant intentionally and without her husband’s knowledge, keeping the pregnancy a secret for several weeks. When she did tell him, he left the next day, and she sat at the airport watching him from afar. She eventually approached him but could not bring herself to ask him to stay, and he began to cry, shielding his face with his notebook. Oskar’s grandmother asked to see her husband cry, as she never had before. She asked her husband to stay, promising to “try harder” (182), but Thomas lamented that he didn’t “know how to live” (181). It was clear he wanted to leave but returned home with his wife for one more night, and she was fooled into believing he was going to stay. The next day, he went to the airport again and never returned. Oskar’s grandmother released all of his pets into the air and streets, and they too never returned.
Oskar’s grandmother talks about how she “spent [her] life learning to feel less” (180) than she did as a child, which began as an effort to shield herself from sadness but ended up engulfing all her emotions. She thinks about her childhood, her sister, and her mother. She remembers when she asked Anna about kissing, and Anna showed her what it was like by kissing her. Oskar’s grandmother recalls feeling the deepest possible love for her sister in that moment. She recalls how her father stayed home during the war, despite his clear need to fight for his country, and how “he must have decided that [her] life weighed more than one hundred lives” (183).
Chapter 9 Summary: “Happiness, Happiness”
For a class presentation, Oskar brings a recorded interview of a man who searched desperately for his daughter after the bombing of Hiroshima. The man describes his frantic search through the streets, and the many people he saw begging for water and with their skin peeling off. Finally, he found his daughter at the water with many wounds, and held her until she died, promising all along that she would not. When the interview is over, the class seems flabbergasted and in shock, but Oskar enthusiastically describes the way the bomb hit the city. A few days later, Jimmy Snyder approaches Oskar in the playground and tries to trick him into calling his own mother a “whore” (192), but Oskar doesn’t fall for it. When Jimmy threatens to punch him, Oskar gives in and then runs away.
On Saturday, Oskar goes to meet Mr. Black so they can start their first excursion together. He gifts Mr. Black a necklace he made with a compass attached to it so that Mr. Black can always find his bed. Mr. Black convinces Oskar to face his fear of public transit, and together they take the train to the Bronx, where Oskar notices that many of the buildings are derelict and empty. They reach the apartment of Agnes Black, but she no longer lives there. A woman who only speaks Spanish answers the door, and she and Mr. Black have a quick conversation. Mr. Black explains to Oskar that Agnes worked at Windows on the World, a multi-room restaurant at the World Trade Center. Oskar wonders if she met his father that day, since he knows he was at the restaurant for a meeting. The next four people that Oskar and Mr. Black visit have no information, but it doesn’t seem to dampen Mr. Black’s motivation at all.
Later that week, Oskar goes to visit his psychologist, Dr. Fein. Dr. Fein asks an endless list of questions about Oskar’s feelings, and then asks if he has experienced any recent changes in his body, wondering if puberty might explain some of Oskar’s emotional struggles. Oskar tries to explain that his extreme emotional state and inability to engage with life (school, family) is the result of his father’s death, not puberty, and Dr. Fein suggests a word-association game. He lists dozens of words, ranging from random words like “cucumber” to important words like “family” and “happiness.” Oskar struggles to make associations with positive words, and in the end decides that the game makes him uncomfortable. For the remainder of the session, Oskar lists his goals for self-improvement, such as trying to attend school and be less emotional. He tells the doctor that he plans to achieve this by burying all his feelings. Before leaving, Dr. Fein asks Oskar if “any good can come from [his] father’s death” (203), which upsets Oskar deeply, but all he does is shrug. When his mother goes to meet with the doctor afterward, Oskar eavesdrops but can only hear snippets of the conversation. The next few pages show these snippets, which suggest that the doctor is concerned about Oskar’s self-harm and wants to hospitalize him. Oskar’s mother refuses. A photograph of the man falling from the WTC is shown, and then another of Thomas’s voicemails follows, but it is mostly him talking to others around him. Oskar feels like he has nothing to look forward to except finding the lock for his key.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Oskar doesn’t understand why his dad had to die. He doesn’t understand why people have to die at all, and he begins to wonder what the point is of living. His existential angst reaches a breaking point when he is performing as the skull of Yorick for his school performance of Hamlet. Wearing the skull of Yorick and pretending to be dead is almost too real for Oskar, and he starts to feel himself slipping away. He fantasizes about becoming violent toward Jimmy and humiliating him in front of everyone, the way Jimmy so often does to Oskar. After so many months of feeling shut down and unable to live, Oskar notes, “I just couldn’t be dead any longer” (145). He improvises and awakens, talking to Hamlet from the world of the dead. Later, Oskar’s fear and confusion comes out as anger when he tells his mother he wishes she was the one who had died. In reality, he is angry at her for not saving his father, although he knows she couldn’t have. Oskar’s preoccupation with his father’s death extends to a preoccupation with war and terror, and this comes out during his class presentation about a man who lived through the Hiroshima bombing during World War II. His descriptions of what he saw are brutal and graphic, but it seems to comfort Oskar to learn about the things that horrify most people. When Oskar goes to visit Dr. Fein, Dr. Fein asks Oskar to come up with a word to associate with happiness, and he cannot. Oskar experiences Fear of Death and Loss as an Obstacle to Living: Unable to understand what happened to his father, Oskar struggles to find any source of joy in his life—that is, until he meets Mr. Black.
Meeting Mr. Black changes Oskar’s life. It gives him a companion and a reason to continue, and Mr. Black also provides Oskar with the company of a father figure, something Oskar desperately needs. It becomes clear when they part months later that Mr. Black also gained something from their relationship, as he began to see Oskar like a son. Mr. Black lived through the entire 20th century and fought in many different wars, and his life, like Oskar’s and Oskar’s grandparents’, was thus defined by war. Mr. Black is the loneliest person Oskar has ever met. His apartment is full of symbolism, including his bed of nails, which symbolizes the endless pain he feels over the loss of his wife, the collection of business cards that represent everyone who has ever inspired him, and his display of masks from all of the countries he has traveled to. The cumulative effect of these symbols is to turn the apartment into something like a shrine to The Influence of the Past on the Present. Given that Mr. Black never leaves the apartment, it’s also like a mausoleum in which he is interred while still alive, full of objects that memorialize his past life.
Like Oskar and his grandparents, Mr. Black has become trapped in the past. His life is an example of Fear of Death and Loss as an Obstacle to Living. Meeting Oskar brings the world back to Mr. Black: Oskar gives him a reason to leave his home for the first time in decades, and Oskar also encourages Mr. Black to hear again. Much like Oskar’s grandfather, who stopped speaking after his experience of war, Mr. Black was shut off to the world and to himself. In meeting Oskar, he felt the confidence needed to open up again, symbolized by the flock of birds that flies past his window. The birds represent the approach of freedom from confinement, and the fact that they are the first thing he hears after so long is a symbol of his reintroduction to the world. The photograph of the flock of birds takes up two pages in the novel, illustrating the importance of the moment.
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By Jonathan Safran Foer
