Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

     The first couple pages of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" were really confusing. Looking back, his thoughts, seemingly spurratic, serve a purpose. Primarily it is to understand the way Oskar's mind works, but in certain parts it helps us understand how he deals with his trauma. On pages 2 and 3, the first paragraph and the last sentence of the last paragraph define this. The paragraphs in between these sentences loosely revolve around his trauma. The first paragraph states : "And also, 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?" Assumably, the 'quick getaway' that inspired this invention was his father dying on 9/11. After this quote, he talks about him being a pacifist, possibly because his father died in such a violent way, His next point transforms from his music being a calming hobby to him feeling that his mother's friend was trying to replace his father : " What I really wanted to tell him was 'You're not my dad, and you never will be.'" In the following paragraph, he talks directly about death, and the rising number of dead people. He curiously goes from death to his grandfather's camera, to "If everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls!" His last point deals directly with his trauma: "Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were sky scrapers that moved up and down while its elevated stayed in place… that could be extremely useful, because if you're on the 95th floor, and a plane hits below you the building could take you to the ground, and everyone  could be safe, even if you left your birdseed shirt home that day." Even though most of his ideas are improbable and seem disconnected, they are his way of dealing with his trauma, as evident on these pages.