“Why I am writing from where you are not”: Absence and presence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s<i>Extremely Loud &amp; Incredibly Close</i>

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate how Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close creates counter‐narratives through the text’s representation of multiple voices within complex meta‐textual narrative structures. Foer exploits the narrative structures/styles of conventional novels by delving into Bildungsroman, confessional realism, and one‐sided epistolary arrangements in order to represent the chaos and lacunas of traumatic events. Both the meta‐textual and the twists on traditional narrative forms create aesthetic artifacts that disrupt reader expectation and amplify the sites of transference holding readers accountable for the retention of cultural memory, thus making it possible to engage in trauma literature in ethical‐empathetic ways.