1. Reading Through the Trauma in Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud
& Incredibly Close and Krauss’ The History of Love
By Brad Cox

2. In the instantaneity of trauma, there is often an implicit pressure for narratives to
appropriately signify the experience, and “resolve emotional conflicts and heal wounds
caused by the loss itself” (Aberbach 23). In “Regarding the Pain of Self and Other,” Ilka Saal
remarks that “language is essential not only for he purpose of giving testimony to pain and
suffering, but also for healing, for the remaking of the world” (453). Even today, there are
still copious World War II, Holocaust, and Hiroshima trauma narratives being published,
even though most of the generations that incurred those events have now passed. Many
trauma narratives have used different aesthetic approaches to signify their experience;
Joseph Heller used hyperbolic plot structure and language to show the (traumatic)
absurdity of war, while Hemingway used terse, repressive prose to mimic the shell shock of
the soldiers; some trauma narratives, like Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009)
ambitiously approach history and deal with cataclysms, like Hiroshima and 9/11,
collectively, using one violent epoch to enlighten another; and authors like Toni Morrison
and Jonathan Safran Foer use magical realism to circumvent the confines of historical
veracity and implement meaning into the traumatic experience.
Many of these works, in short, fixate on the importance of writing process, the actual
forming of the language used to build the trauma narrative. However, three specific,
contemporary trauma narratives– Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love– uniquely utilize
the reading process to deal with the trauma of 9/11 and the Holocaust. This is not to say
that these works disparage the writing process as a tool for handling trauma– in fact, these
works utilize many of the aesthetic approaches mentioned above, such as magical realism
and hyperbolic prose. Rather, within these works, the reading process is tantamount to the

3. writing process and to these aesthetic approaches. For if trauma is primarily dissociative in
it nature– trauma “crosses limits, disrupts boundaries, and threatens to collapse
distinctions” (Nadal and Calvo 2)– and a trauma narrative is an attempt to communicate
and “reconstruct” (Saal 453) that disconnect, reading is therefore a way to receive that
communication and complete that reconstruction. Each of the protagonists in these works,
like Leo, Oskar, and Alex’s grandfather, admits to the despair of loneliness and shame after
incurring their trauma, and each character both writes and reads text to connect to other
trauma victims and commence their recovery.
The Reversal of Art and Life in Everything is Illuminated
Foer’s metafictional novel, Everything is Illuminated, is solely composed of the
correspondence between characters Alex and Jonathan after their pilgrimage to
Trachimbrod. There is no omniscient narrator that enters the text, rendering separate
narratives or details that neither Jonathan nor Alex could possess knowledge of; the only
separate narrator that enters the text is Alex’s Grandfather, but even his narrative is a letter
addressed to Jonathan. Every “chapter” of the novel is part of a serial literary exchange
between characters, written for the purpose of being read by a specific audience. The
readers of Foer’s novel, then, are not distantly spectating a novel’s secluded world as if it
existed despite the text’s description of it; rather, the readers are “witnessing” a world
being created through the very process of reading it.
By reading the text, since each narrative is addressed to an audience, the text is
made complete. Though the letters are not addressed specifically to the readers, the
addressing of the letters proves the purpose of writing them– that writing is not a selfish
action of relaying an experience, or, in this case, relaying the trauma of the Holocaust;

4. writing is an endeavor to communicate outside the shamed self in order to be read,
witnessed, and empathized with. Joshua Pederson states that “[t]rauma forces the self into
hiding” (335). In Everything is Illuminated, shame is often paired with the act of hiding, and
Alex, Little Igor, Jonathan, and Alex’s grandfather each feel burdened by shame after
incurring their traumas. But the writing and reading process renders a way to find “second
chances” (144) and step out from their seclusion and be witnessed. And “it is only the act of
listening,” or reading, “[that] can provide the witness” that the survivor needs (Strümper-
Kobb 256). Thus, the attempt to communicate the trauma narrative is completed once it is
received– once the reader experiences the narrative, like Alex experiences Jonathan’s
fiction, and is able to connect their own trauma narrative to what was read.
When Jonathan, Alex, and Alex’s grandfather finally reach Trachimbrod, Lista tells
them that she “has been waiting for [them] for so long” (118). In the beginning of their
pilgrimage, Jonathan thought Augustine existed for him to find. Originally, the purpose of
the journey was for Jonathan to find and thank Augustine for helping his grandfather
escape the Nazis in Europe. But when they reach Trachimbrod and find Lista rather than
Augustine, Alex and Jonathan learn that they existed to find Lista, to witness her and listen
to her trauma narrative– implying that it is more important for Jonathan to listen (the oral
equivalent of reading) than to speak. When Lista gives Jonathan a ring artifact of the
demolished Trachimbrod, she tells him: “The ring does not exist for you. You exist for the
ring. The ring is not in case of you. You are in case of the ring” (192). The audience exists
for the object that is sought. Foer’s novel– and all its trauma narratives– do not exist for the
reader; rather, the reader exists for the narrative– to read it and process it, because

5. without the reader, the narrative remains incomplete, and the trauma survivor remains
isolated and concealed, like Lista.
But the reading process is not just cathartic for the survivor, the writer of the
trauma narrative; the reading process is significantly cathartic for the reader as well. In the
novel, Alex serves as Jonathan’s translator on the journey to Trachimbrod and as a reader
of Jonathan’s fiction as it is being written. Alex’s character, then, is primarily predicated on
his ability to listen/read and provide witness to the trauma narratives he encounters. More
so, as Alex reads and reacts to Jonathan’s fiction– a trauma narrative of Trachimbrod– his
own character begins to develop, and he is able to handle the trauma he faces at home
through his abusive, alcoholic father.
Interestingly, it is not the actual experience of the journey to Trachimbrod that
changes Alex’s character. It is made distinctly clear in the beginning of the novel that all of
the letters are written post-Trachimbrod: “This is my occasion to utter thank you for being
so long suffering with me on our voyage […] I must eat a slice of humble pie for not finding
Augustine, but you clutch how rigid it was” (23). Thus, even after journey, Alex remains
immature and “unilluminated.” All of the character development– the illumination– that
occurs within Foer’s novel, then, only transpires after the journey and during the
correspondence, when Alex reflects on the journey by writing about it and by reading
Jonathan’s fiction.
In his early letters, Alex consistently masks his broken character with “premium”
lies, such as his excessive “dissemination” of his currency, his large penis and his numerous
sexual encounters, and even Little Igor’s bruises that result from his “clumsy” behavior
(23). But, the more Alex reads Jonathan’s fiction, the more “slices of humble pie” he eats

6. and he learns to no longer concern himself with such shallow, egoistic pretensions. In one
of his earlier letters, Alex says to Jonathan: “I have learned many momentous lessons from
your writing. One lesson is that it does not matter if you are a guileless, or modest, or
delicate. Just be yourself” (179). Thus, we learn that Alex has truly never been carnal with
women, that he actually saves his money for a possible immigration into America (100),
and that Little Igor’s bruises (and some Alex’s as well) are from their drunken father’s
beatings (68).
Alex also learns the difference between the “befitting not-truths” (57) of Jonathan’s
fiction and the premium lies that he creates for himself. Alex’s premium lies are equivalent
to the denial of his existing reality, of his true self; and as Cathy Caruth states, the trauma
narrative “of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape of reality […] attests to its
endless impact on life” (7 italics added). Not-truths in Jonathan’s fiction are imaginative
fillings within history’s holes, used to “affirm the significance of historical contexts” (Adams
19), like of the Holocaust, without attempting to change or deny the outcome of the trauma
itself. Jonathan’s magical realist account of Trachimbrod, clearly teeming with impossible
historical fabrications, uses fiction as a way to both re-experience and thereby heal from a
traumatic past when it is read. The point is not to be fastidious with history, for even
history is laden with misgivings– like Sofiowka’s witness account of the collapse of
Trachim’s wagon into the Brod: “[the wagon] suddenly flipped itself, and if that’s not
exactly the truth then the wagon didn’t flip itself… and if that doesn’t seem quite correct
then what happened was…” (9). Nor is the point to deny history and construct utopias
where trauma, like World War II or the Holocaust, never occurred– at one point, Alex even
queries Jonathan: “if we are to be nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story

7. more premium to life?” (179). Trachimbrod was doomed to obliteration when Jonathan’s
story began, just as Safran’s sharp teeth caused an early lapse in his breastfeeding, which
caused malnutrition in his dead arm, which lead to his numerous affairs and the birth of
Jonathan Safran Foer– “Wasn’t everything that had happened… the inevitable result of
circumstances over which he had no control?” (165). Jonathan even tauntingly provides
space to change history within his fiction, only to refuse it in the end; at the moment before
the bombs are about to strike the shtetl, time freezes, and Jonathan provides a series of
ellipses, a literal space for his characters to leave the village before history continues and
Trachimbrod is set ablaze. But of course, the characters do not leave, “history runs its
course, and Foer stages [his] powerlessness to change it” (Codde 678). To change the
course of history would defeat the very purpose of the trauma narrative– to face and mend
from the trauma, rather than hide from it.
Yet, as Jonathan writes in both the beginning and conclusion of his fiction, “The
beginning of the world often comes” (8, 267). One ending only foments another beginning.
As the Dial states to Safran within Jonathan’s novel, “Every parent who loses a child finds a
way to laugh again… Every love is carved from loss… [W]e learn to live in that love” (266).
Even Jonathan’s fiction, a story desperately searching for love, for an illumination to match
the illumination of the shtetl’s bombing, is carved from an absence. As we learn from Alex’s
account of the voyage, when Jonathan and Alex reach Trachimbrod all they find is
“darkness” (187) and more absence. But it is precisely by this absence, this hole, that
Jonathan is able to fill it with his own understanding, with his own experience of history
and trauma; and “Jonathan’s own unreserved exercise of freedom [speaks] directly and

8. ethically to […] Alex’s own freedom to reconsider what it means to be human, and
ultimately to change his life” (Eisenstein 83) by standing up to his alcoholic father.
All of this importantly elucidates the intimate entanglement between the two
narratives, between Jonathan’s fiction and Alex’s reality. When commenting on a particular
scene in of Jonathan’s fiction, Alex writes: “I made to remember that when I read what you
wrote. (With our writing, we are reminding each other of things. We are making one story,
yes?)” (144). The two “refracted” narratives, as they are being written and read, inevitably
collide into one story, allowing “characters and readers […] to grasp gradually disclosed
truths about past events related not only to the Holocaust and Jonathan’s grandfather, but
also to Alex’s family” (Collado-Rodriguez 56). For instance, Alex’s narrative collides with
his grandfather’s when Alex translates his grandfather’s confession of ceding his Jewish
friend to the Nazis so that his family could live: “Grandfather said I am I but this could not
be true the truth is that I also pointedatHerschel and I also said heisaJew… he is still guilty I
am I am Iam IamI?” (252). “Alex reads the statement as a comment on his own identity”
(Propst 42), and like the typography of this scene, the identities and narratives of Alex and
his grandfather mesh and become indistinguishable. Narratives within the novel are thus
bound to the narratives of their readers.
Jonathan’s fiction is in fact so intimately bound to Alex’s reality that some of its
scenes begin to bleed into Alex’s life. This is a hegemonic theme within the novel, after all,
set by Pinchas T., the fictional philosopher of the shtetl who argued “it would be possible, in
theory, for life and art to be reversed” (90). In the novel’s conclusion, both the art of
Jonathan’s fiction and the reality of Alex’s life intersect when Alex’s grandfather commits
suicide in the bathtub after writing the resolution: “I will…” (272), echoing the death of

9. Trachim in the beginning of Jonathan’s fiction, who also died in water surrounded by
written resolutions of “I will…” (25). In another episode, halfway through the novel, when
Alex and Jonathan reach Trachimbrod, Alex reads a fictional scene from Jonathan’s diary
describing a scene when Alex stands up to his abusive father and kicks him out of the house.
As Collado-Rodriguez states, “Jonathan’s diary becomes an invitation for Alex to rebel
against his father, and it foreshadows the ethical choice Alex will make about his own
future” (61). But this “invitation” remains incomplete without Alex’s reception, and it
cannot become a reality until Alex reads the diary, By reading and experiencing Jonathan’s
writings, Alex is able to shape his character (and thereby his reality) according to what he
gleans from Jonathan’s text.
Aligning Trauma Narratives in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close follows the quixotic journey of Oskar Schell,
a precocious child whose father died in 9/11, and who travels throughout New York City to
locate the complementary lock to a mysterious key found in his father’s blue vase. The
narrative is mostly comprised of Oskar’s writings, though a few sections are written by his
grandmother and grandfather. Unlike Everything Is Illuminated and The History of Love,
though each voice addresses their writings to a specific character within the novel, there is
no indication that they are actually read by that intended audience. Even though Oskar’s
grandfather addresses all of his letters to his son, Thomas, Oskar’s father, we learn that
Thomas died before he could ever read his father’s letters (311); the only letter that we can
be certain Thomas read is the one Thomas circled all the “mistakes” in red pen (208-216)–
when his father was alive, Oskar and he would read through the New York Times and mark
all the errors with red pen. And, though the grandmother addresses her letters to Oskar,

10. Oskar never explicitly mentions them within his own writings– giving no indication he has
received or read them.
The only explanation to the novel’s narrative structure– to the fact that all the voices
and writings are presented in distinguishable and chronological order– is that Oskar Schell
has amalgamated all the characters’ writings, in the same way that he has amalgamated his
mail and photos into his writings. Oskar was present when his grandfather placed all of his
son’s unread letters into Thomas’ empty coffin, so it is reasonable to infer that Oskar took
some of those letters from the coffin to incorporate into his narrative; and in the novel’s
conclusion, when Oskar rewinds the events of 9/11 and reverses the pictures of the falling
body so that the body ascends into the sky, Oskar aesthetically echoes his grandmother’s
dream, where the history of the world reverses– so that “people apologized for things that
were about to happen,” the animals of the Noah’s ark descended two by two, and “Eve put
the apple back onto the branch” (311-312). Therefore, it is reasonable to assume Oskar did
in fact read his grandmother’s writings.
If Oskar, then, amalgamated all of these writings together, Extremely Loud &
Incredibly Close is not a work by Jonathan Safran Foer, but a “collective trauma” (Cooper
61) diary of the Schell family, dating from his grandparents’ experiences in the Holocaust to
his father’s death in 9/11. “By interlacing two generations and depicting the different
cityscapes as devastated and wounded memory sites the novel can be read as a way to
‘universailiz[e] grief’ “ (Bardizbanian 311) while still “reinforcing diverse
perspectives/voices from the chaos of the unique experience” (Atchison 360). This
universalization and collective narrative structure instantiates the collective nature of
humanity and history within the novel. Time, within this work, does not consist of isolated

11. events; time is often dissociated and interrupted– similar to the way Oskar’s narrative is
interrupted by his photographic, “self-reflexive narrative ruptures” (Atchison 359) from
different time periods– but being built and “completed” by fragments of the past. On the
one hand, these narrative ruptures, particularly the photographs, ethically “encourage us
[readers] to seek both emotion and knowledge” and remain cautious “about the dangers of
settling for simple interpretations” about trauma like 9/11 (Gleich 163, 169). But the
narrative ruptures, like Oskar’s photographs, primarily encourage the reader to “take on
the role of co-creator” (Atchison 360) and piece together the contexts between the
photographs and the texts that they are paired with. For example, when Oskar listens to his
mother’s therapy session through the door, the reader is able to notice visual resemblance
between the falling body and the layout of the text, which is full of spaces and line breaks–
because Oskar is not able to capture every word of the session– as if the text were falling
down the page (204-205). This evinces a fall of language that is synonymous with the
towers’ collapse. Oskar’s grandparents also exhibit a linguistic collapse after losing their
families in the Nazi raids– the grandfather writes so much that it cannot fit on the page,
while the grandmother writes only in spaces.
9/11, though an immense and violent epoch, is not an isolated, historical incident of
trauma, in the same way that Oskar’s grief– though he sometimes selfishly possesses it– is
shared by his mom and others, despite his inability to see it. 9/11 is tethered to a history of
traumatic cataclysms, and, on a local level, to other lives that have incurred different
tragedies and different traumas. It is a collective, historical trauma steeped within the
history of a collective humanity. Oskar’s Stuff that Happened to Me– a book of collected,
graphic photographs depicting others’ (oftentimes traumatic) experiences– is thus at once

12. an attempt to appropriate and partake in this collective humanity. And his grandmother’s
dream of rewinding of the earth’s history is not an impractical denial of her painful present,
but a dream of her origins, of “where [she] came from” (306); the grandmother recognizes
that she is born from a cycle of traumas and recoveries, of others’ (and her own)
bereavements and mendings. She has suffered through the trauma of the Nazis and
survived, and will therefore survive losing her son in 9/11.
Oskar’s trauma narrative, by itself, remains isolated and incomplete without these
other narratives because it myopically views 9/11 as an incomparable, “single paradigm”
(Mullins 302)– “the worst day” (17)– while others, like his grandmother, are able to more
healthily view 9/11 holistically and in light of history.
Literary critics Sien Uytterschout and Kristiaan Versluys suggest that “traumatized
people have to express themselves and try to fit their experiences into a larger, coherent
whole” (218). It is therefore necessary that other trauma narratives are included to
complete Oskar’s trauma narrative in order to, in the words of Saal, reconstruct its
shattered narrative. This includes the narratives of the numerous “Blacks” that Oskar meets
in his search for the lock, like Abby Black– who suffers in an emotionally desiccating
relationship with her grief-stricken husband– and Mr. Black from 6A– an agoraphobic who
never left his apartment after his wife’s death; his mother’s friend, Ron, whose family
tragically died in a car accident; and the traumas listed in his grandmother’s dream, which
goes back to “the beginning of time” (311), vividly relaying the death of her family and even
the flood of the earth in Genesis.
There are other global, historical traumas mentioned within the novel as well. For a
school science presentation, Oskar brings in a recorded interview of a Hiroshima bombing

13. victim, who lost her daughter in the air raid (187). But when the interview begins, the
location is unspecified and the details are ambiguous, making it sound remarkably similar
to 9/11: an air raid that caused explosions and windows to shatter. One on level, Oskar’s
presentation intentionally aligns the traumas to remind America of a time when it was the
instigator of such a violent cataclysm. But on another level, Oskar’s presentation “employs”
and aligns “the past to elucidate his present trauma” (Hirth 346).
Oskar’s grandmother’s narrative also aligns the traumas of the Holocaust and 9/11.
The aerial attack and the twin towers’ collapse on her son triggers her memory of the Nazi
aerial attacks and her house’s collapse on her father and sister when she was a child. But
rather than solely grieve, the grandmother begins to write her history, her trauma
narrative, for Oskar. The narrative mostly accounts for her marriage with Oskar’s
grandfather, who left before the birth of Thomas Schell because of the “many rules” (108)
constructed within their marriage, and primarily because the grandmother reminded him
of her sister, Anna, whom he loved before she died in the Nazi air raids (310). After 9/11,
however, the grandfather returns “to mourn” (268) the loss of what he “never had” (310)–
both his son and Anna. 9/11, with its striking resemblance to the trauma they incurred in
Europe, renders a second chance for the grandparents to “try to live” (268)– and to
confront and recover what was broken, including their marriage. The novel concludes with
the grandparents living together at the airport, inhabiting a limbo between “coming and
going,” “something and nothing,” “yes and no” (312). The airport is obviously redolent with
the traumas of the air raids, yet teeming with new beginnings represented by new potential
locations.

14. By reading the narratives of his grandparents, Oskar is able to witness their
recovery and glean meaningful methods of coping– such as mentally rewinding 9/11 to
relive the past moments with his father, or his Grandma’s truism that “it’s always necessary”
to communicate (280). Oskar is also able to vicariously find in others’ narratives what he
himself cannot capture– like forgiveness from Abbey Black’s ex-husband for not
communicating, for “not being able to tell anyone” (302) about his father’s phone calls
moments before his death, and for not picking up his father’s last phone call. At the same
time, Oskar is able to fill the void of others’– like when Oskar utters an animal sound at his
father’s wake that his grandmother had “spent forty years of [her] life looking for, what
[she] wanted [her] life and life story to be” (232). Such narrative complementation occurs
throughout the novel with different characters as well: the way the grandmother’s journal
of blank spaces complements his grandfather’s need for more space to write, or the way
Ron and Oskar’s mother “help each other” (171) through their tragedies, even though they
occurred in different circumstances. “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” says Mullins,
“posits an unbreakable bond between identity collectives […] based on the common
experience of trauma” (301). More so, these collective identities– each defined by
individual traumatic experiences– are able to help each other form cohesive trauma
narratives of loss and recovery.
Reading as Survival in The History of Love
Nicole Krauss’ novel, The History of Love, is comprised of four different narrators:
Leo Gursky, the true Jewish author of The History of Love who lost his family and friends in
a Nazi invasion and currently resides in New York; an anonymous, omniscient narrator that
tells the story of Zvi Litvinoff, who plagiarized the authorship of Gursky’s novel The History

15. of Love; Alma Singer, a teenage daughter trying to manipulate romance between her
mourning mother and a mysterious man named Jacob Marcus, who has requested Alma’s
mother to translate Gursky’s The History of Love into English; and Alma’s quirky brother
Bird, a devout Jew who believes he is a “lamed vovnik–” one of the thirty six people ‘“that
the existence of the world depends on”’ (52). Each narrator’s section is preceded by a
specific symbol and oftentimes a particular writing format so that the reader is able to
identify which voice is speaking: Leo’s sections are indicated by a heart, the anonymous
narrator’s writings by book, Alma’s journal entries are paired with a compass and
capitalized headings, e.g. “3. MY BROTHER BELIEVES IN GOD” and “4. MY FATHER DIED
WHEN I WAS SEVEN” (36-37), and Bird’s journal entries are indicated by a pathetically
constructed ark and the Hebrew spelling of God’s name, “the name no one is allowed to
pronounce and no one is allowed to throw away” (37).
Though each narrator– except for the anonymous one– primarily writes with the
intention of privacy, such enclosed spaces are inevitably invaded. Writing, within Krauss’
novel, is a communal action, a communication that requires the reciprocation of being read.
Thus, even though Alma rages at her brother for reading her journal How to Survive in the
Wild, without Bird having read the journal and contacted Leo Gursky, Alma never would
have completed her search for the true author of The History of Love. And even though Leo
says he is able to finally write again because he intends to “never show a word of it to
anyone” (6) later he admits that he was wrong and in fact needed someone to read his
work. The reading process, within The History of Love, is a sacred, life-giving method to
survival primarily because it overcomes the loneliness of trauma by building connections,
thereby continuing humanity’s “history of love.”

16. As in Everything is Illuminated, being read is a way of being witnessed. The only
thing Leo Gursky wants in life is “not to die on a day when [he] went unseen,” (4) which is
why he consistently makes scenes in public, such as trying on all the shoes in shoe stores,
spilling all of his change on floors, or enlisting as a nude model for an art class (3-5). But
Leo Gursky is truly witnessed when his work is being read. It is, after all, by reading Leo’s
name tag– “MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN
CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR
CONSIDERATION” (239)– that Alma is able identify Leo on the park bench and finally credit
him as the true author of The History of Love. Simultaneously, when Leo is not being read,
like when he meets his son, Isaac Babel, at a book signing, Leo Gursky remains as
anonymous and lonely as before. When Leo flaps his arms like a bird in response to Isaac’s
question “Is there anything else,” Isaac cannot understand Leo’s attempt to communicate,
and therefore casts Leo off as a lunatic, rather than his actual father. Isaac only identifies
Leo as his father after he reads Leo’s letters along with Leo’s manuscript Words for
Everything.
But the reading process also possesses a sacred, life-giving power within the novel.
Though Bird believes writing God’s name on texts or objects makes them indelible, he
eventually learns the four Hebrew letters cannot protect the object’s permanence, like his
ark after it is carried to the junkyard to be demolished because it is considered a fire
hazard (205). In fact, it is precisely Bird’s verbal and written communication to others that
he is a lamed vovnik that makes his sacred identity questionable; as Bird’s Jewish mentor
Mr. Goldstein states, “A lamed vovnik is humble and works in secret” (205). At the end of
the novel, then, Bird fulfills his mystical, sacred role, not by writing, but by reading. In order

17. to “maintain the existence of the world,” and commit a proper altruistic act that any lamed
vovnik would do, Bird reads Alma’s journal– which coincidentally shares a title about
maintaining one’s existence outside civilization: How to Survive in the Wilderness– to
complete (what he believes to be) her search for her true biological father.
Interestingly, Bird’s interpretation of Alma’s text did not have to be “correct” to help
Alma complete her search. While Alma is searching for the true author of The History of
Love, Bird believes Alma is searching for her biological father, who happens to be the
author of The History of Love. But it is Alma’s “code” of writing that leads Bird to his
erroneous conclusions; Alma lists all of the “clues” of her search under the heading “HOW
TO SURVIVE IF YOUR PARACHUTE DOESN’T OPEN” in case “anyone was going to snoop
around her journal” (104). But this list is a code that even Alma cannot untangle, a series of
dots that she cannot connect. Bird, however, despite his erroneous conclusion, is able to fill
in those missing spaces. Like Rosa Litvinoff’s introduction to her plagiarist husband’s novel,
which is “shadowed throughout… with pauses, suggestions, ellipses… in which the reader
can project his or her own imagination” (67), Bird projects his own imagination within the
cryptic spaces of his sister’s text, filling in the gaps (like punctuation or text) and
completing the unfinished code. Thus, the reader’s reaction to the text is as imperative as
the text itself, because, as in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the reader “co-creates” the
text.
Indeed, the process of reading seems directly linked to the process of survival. Lang
states, “[s]urvival links together the two primary narrators in both reading and writing. Leo
survives the Holocaust; Alma survives the death of her father. Leo writes The History of
Love; Alma writes How to Survive in the Wilderness” (Lang 47). When Zvi Litvinoff visits his

18. lifetime friend, Leo Gursky, during one of Leo’s ailments, Litvinoff reads Leo’s self-written
obituary to keep Leo alive throughout the night: “He read it over and over, mouthing the
words as if they were not an announcement of death, but a prayer for life. As if just by
saying them, he could keep his friend safe from the angel of death” (117). And when Alma
compares her mother’s “WALL OF DICTIONARIES”– her trail of ripped dictionary pages
that she leaves around the house– to “petals of an immense flowers” (46) within her
journal, she is connecting her mother’s process of finding language to her previous journal
entry, which discusses the particular flowers that are edible and able to maintain one’s
existence if consumed in the wilderness (44).
Perhaps the most obvious way the reading process facilitates survival is through its
power of fomenting feeling in its audience. In Jacob Marcus’ letter to Alma’s mother, he
relays his reading experience of The History of Love as a child: “I don’t know what to say
about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a
book. What I mean is, in some way I’d find almost impossible to describe, it changed me”
(55). Gursky also describes the audience’s experience of art within his novel The History of
Love: “From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no
one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes
place, a new feeling enters a world” (107). With characters like Leo or Alma’s mother, who
feel confined to their loss and despair, reading grants them the ability to experience
different feelings, such as hope and love.
But reading also teaches the characters’ different methods– even more accurate
methods– of expressing themselves and connecting with others. Communication, within
the novel, is a consistent endeavor to break through the divisions the world “purposefully

19. puts… in place” (63), in order to become transparent so that what is inside can be seen or
read by the outside. Both Leo and Alma, though through different approaches, search for
“words for everything,” for the communication that will properly define each thing. Leo
defines everything by what it is– “What’s this? He’d ask, kissing her elbow. Elbow!” (11)–
while Alma defines things by what they are not– WHAT I AM NOT (36). Both of these
characters, after having suffered the trauma of losing family, find language insufficient in
capturing “the effort they call, for lack of a better term, being human” (236).
As Leo writes, “[l]ife demanded a new language” (3) after their trauma; thus each
character, especially Leo, challenges and reworks the structures of language, like Leo’s
utilization of idioms, like “by heart” (10) and “larger than life” (9), in more literal contexts
to change their meanings. Occasionally, characters will also invent neologism, such as
Bruno’s “LIFE IS BUTIFUL,” indicating the beauty of life’s unpredictability, like the
numerous “buts” and “And yet” ‘s of Leo’s narrative. Bruno and Leo also comprise new
ways of communicating through physical action, such as tapping on the windowpane: twice
means yes and once means no. In his novel, Leo writes that when people communicate with
their hands “it’s because [they] remember a time when the division between mind and
body, brain, and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside was so much less” (73). At the end
of the novel, then, when Leo taps Alma twice on her shoulder because he is overwhelmed
with joy at finally being seen– and because he “[is] afraid [to] choose the wrong sentence”
(252)– Leo is actually teaching Alma a new form of communication in order to overcome
that division between mind and body, between the inside and outside.
As Leo writes, “to live in an undescribed world [is] too lonely” (7). But to live in a
world unread or unheard is lonelier. Though Leo communicated with his son at the book

20. signing, Isaac could not read Leo’s words, and thus Leo was alone and invisible once more.
Alma, however, unlike Isaac, is able to read Leo’s “words,” reciprocate his language, and
connect with Leo. This reciprocation occurs so vividly that, at the end of the novel, there is
no distinguishing symbol or structure between Alma’s or Leo’s narrative; both of the
characters’ narratives share the exact same layout on the page and cohere into one another
in the same way that Alma and Leo embrace each other on the park bench. The traumas of
each character are shared, and both are able to give each other “a renewed sense of
meaning and purpose” (Berger and Milbauer 69), and substitute for what the other person
lost. Alma is able to stand in for the Alma that Leo fell in love with and lost years ago, and
Leo is able to stand in for Alma’s absent father.
Conclusion: Why We Read
The inception of change, according to these trauma narratives, does not occur when
the actual trauma occurs; for in that moment, only a benumbed shock takes over the
characters, dissociating them from time and other human beings– like Leo’s ageless, lonely
existence after fleeing from the Nazis and immigrating to America, or Alex’s grandfather
after ceding his Jewish friend to the Nazis. Cathy Caruth suggests that a subject’s trauma is
not located in the experience, but in the “latency” or “belated impact” of survival, where the
conscience processes the traumatic experience as it “returns” and “haunt[s] the victim” (6-
7). Though the trauma obviously inhibits the characters from living normally again (and in
some sense “changes” their behaviors), it plateaus their characters, stagnating any feeling
and thereby preventing any change or development to take place. Instead, the characters
develop through their experience of literature– of writing, being read, and reading others.

21. These trauma narratives– rather than yield to the theoretical pressure of writing
something “new” to signify the unfamiliar nature of trauma– do not ignore the power in
literature’s practicality. For the reader, literature holds the power to poignantly mend what
is broken by fomenting feelings that exist outside the ostensible, inescapable despair and
loneliness of trauma. It possesses the ability to, as Leo states, make the “impossible
possible” (250), and bring hope where to what was previously thought hopeless. For the
writer, the writing process is an endeavor to step out from the dark, painful recesses and
be seen; being read, then, is the very act of being witnessed, of overcoming the lonely and
isolated grief and finding connection.
Foer and Krauss importantly do not attempt to provide reason in their narratives;
Oksar will never find within his grandparents’ writings any logistic answers to the trauma
of losing his father in 9/11, nor can Alex find explanations in Jonathan’s fictional novel as to
why his family’s abuse and dysfunction continues, despite the awareness of its negative
effects. Nor do these narratives attempt to moralize the cataclysm by claiming the “good”
that comes out of trauma; such sententious motives are only frustrating for the trauma
victim, like Oksar when his therapist asks if any good can come from his father’s death.
Rather, these trauma narratives provide meaningful experience, a space for emotional
movement to occur within the readers. They put aside veracity and use imagination to fill
the holes of uncertainty with comfort and love.

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