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Grandpa Schell: A Brief Analysis

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In confronting his past trauma, Thomas Schell Sr. is unable to come to terms with the loss that he has suffered which highlights how grief is an inconclusive process as he is unable to make meaning of his experience and find closure and instead deals with his trauma by not dealing with it.
The effect of the grief experienced by grandpa Schell impedes his psychological and physical processes like his ability to both move on from his trauma and speaking. Foer establishes that Thomas Schell Sr. is a survivor of the Allied bombings of Dresden and lost the woman he loved, his unborn child, his family and his city. The first indication in the novel that these events were incredibly traumatic for him was when he described in one of his letters to his son that he “couldn’t keep my mouth shut” and that eventually “silence overtook me like cancer” (16). This trauma causes him to become mute and he therefore communicates through writing. This …show more content…

Before the tragedy he was once an aspiring sculptor who was incredibly passionate about what he did, however once he loses all that he held close, he lost his drive to perform his art. During his marriage to grandma Schell many of his days are spent, instead of sculpting, at the airport where he constantly asks people for the time and watches people reunite and leave each other. In this way, Thomas Schell exists in a state of near purgatory at the airport as he is neither coming or going and is just existing and observing. This shows how his process of grieving has seemingly no end as he cannot find it in himself to both let go of the past and move forward with living his life to pursue his dreams and aspirations. Thomas Schell Sr.’s experiences with grief and his inability to move on directly contrast with both his wife’s and his grandson Oskar’s experiences with tragedy, as both are able to find some closure for the trauma that they

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