Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close Symbolism

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reasoning behind this is, "there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?" (Foer 2). When Oskar talks about making a quick getaway, there is a very large chance that he was thinking about the fate of his father. With the invention of a birdseed shirt, birds would help to ensure safety, thus symbolizing safety.

The birds also symbolize captivity. Foer writes, "'Ten thousand birds die every year from smashing into windows... so I invented a device that would detect when a bird is incredibly close to a building, and that would trigger an extremely loud birdcall from another skyscraper, and they'd be drawn to that'... 'But the birds would never leave Manhattan,' Ruth said. 'Which would be great,' I told her," (Foer 250). Oskar wants to keep all the birds in Manhattan. He wants to keep them captive and safe, away from all the dangers of the real world. The idea of freedom that generally comes to mind when birds are mentioned is taken away here, because all the birds would be held captive in Manhattan. …show more content…

Well, for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the answer is here. All throughout the book, the author describes things with the adjectives 'extremely' and 'incredibly'. Oskar's emotions are very vibrant and crazy, so those adjectives make sense. But the 'loud' and 'close' don't really make much