Love is significant for the characters in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Each character went through their own hardships and struggles because of the way love treats them. Jonathan Safran Foer conveys the characters through their experiences of love that destroys them. Their devastated love brings them ultimate pain and grief in which they try to confront. Their confrontations lead them to have conflicted feelings and causes them to have huge changes, resulting in them to heal. Moreover, the characters experiencing grief, pain, and trauma because of love, ultimately end up okay in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
Oskar’s grandfather is one of the characters that experienced the most pain and grief because of love. In the past, Thomas
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He goes searching for the people with the last name Black to see how they relate to his father and the mysterious key. He finds Fo Black, who reminds him of his frustration and miserableness, resulting from his love for his dead father, along with his feelings that he cannot bear to face. When he asks Fo if he “really loves New York or if he was just wearing the shirt”(Foer 239), Fo becomes nervous since he does not understand. Oskar then enunciates each word of his question with pointing gestures to Fo’s shirt. From this point, Oskar is trying to help Fo understand, which is beautiful since just a moment ago, they were complete strangers. He points at NY for New York, and Fo realizes NY does not mean ‘you.’ All this time, Fo thought ‘I love New York’ was ‘I love you.’ He bought all these ‘I love NY’ merchandise for nothing, and it causes him to feel a whole lot of emotions. Oskar “couldn’t tell what Fo was feeling because he couldn’t speak the language of his feelings”(Foer 239). This relates to how Oskar’s inability to express his own feelings reflects his actions. In other words, he cannot say and act the way he wants to. The exchange between him and his father, “Dad?” “Yeah, buddy?” “Nothing.”(Foer 223) haunts him since it’s the last moment they shared together. ‘Nothing’ was a missed opportunity to say ‘I love you.’ Grief is what he feels as he thinks, “Goodbye! I love you! Goodbye! I love you!”(Foer 73). He wanted to say this to his father when his father left messages on the phone just before he died. Hiding and not telling his father’s messages to anyone is a burden that destroys him. He is destroyed by the love he has for his father. Love occupies and consumes him in a painful way that he cannot do anything about it because he cannot let go of it. If he does, he might lose everything - from their cherished memories together to his memory and feelings of his father,