Even though guilt and fear often seem like the main emotions in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, all the characters who revolve in and out of Oskar’s life have very strong connections to people they love: love, more than anything else, drives people to do what they do. Death also plays a powerful role in love, since one of the most powerful types of love in the novel is for people who have died. Oskar’s love for his Dad propels him on his quest around New York City. Grandpa loves Anna, his first wife, so deeply that he can no longer speak after she dies.
Oskar’s Dad and Oskar’s Grandma are both very close with Oskar, and Oskar feels as though he can be completely himself around them, rather than having to hide his intelligence or his quirks. Oskar is extremely verbally precocious and asks sharp, often bizarre existential questions, but rather than ignoring these queries or trying to quash Oskar’s quirky curiosity, Dad and Grandma both understand how Oskar functions and speak to him in his language. Dad plays games with Oskar and pushes him intellectually (of course, we only really see their relationship through Oskar’s memory). Grandma takes all of Oskar’s strange habits and mannerisms very seriously, rather than calling him ridiculous, and they develop routines together.
Mom, on the other hand, doesn’t quite have the same rapport with Oskar as Dad and Grandma do. While Mom loves Oskar, she can’t enter into his world in the same way. Mom doesn’t seem to play a very active role throughout most of the book, since she doesn’t accompany Oskar on his quest throughout the city, and she doesn’t seem to be someone in whom Oskar can confide or with whom Oskar has long conversations. However, at the end of the novel, Oskar finds out that his Mom has been behind the scenes of his entire quest. She found out that he was visiting every person named Black in New York, and she called them ahead of time to alert them to her son’s movements.
Love binds people together, but family is an even deeper tie. Grandpa and Grandma also have a relationship that develops, eventually, into a very different kind of love than passion or desire. Although Grandpa left Grandma angrily when she became pregnant, because that broke the terms of their initial relationship, they eventually begin to forgive each other when he returns to her house as a renter. William Black, the Black who owned the key, had a very complicated relationship with his father, but when Oskar presents him with the key, which turns out to be to Black’s father’s safe deposit box, the key unlocks a wellspring of emotion. (Even though the key doesn’t do much literal unlocking, it does a lot of symbolic and emotional unlocking throughout the novel.)
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love and Family ThemeTracker
Love and Family Quotes in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I spent all day walking around the park, looking for something that might tell me something, but the problem was that I didn’t know what I was looking for…But that’s how tricky Dad could be. There was nothing, which would have been unfortunate, unless nothing was a clue. Was nothing a clue?
“Well, what I get is why we do exist? I don’t mean how, but why.” I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, “We exist because we exist.” “What the?” “We could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.”
There were four more messages from him: one at 9:12, one at 9:31, one at 9:46, and one at 10:04. I listened to them, and listened to them again, and then before I had time to figure out what to do, or even what to think or feel, the phone started ringing.
It was 10:26:47.
I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was him.
I haven’t always been silent, I used to talk and talk and talk and talk, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, the silence overtook me like a cancer.
And maybe you could rate the people you knew by how much you loved them, so if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!
We took the blueprint of our apartment from the hallway closet and taped it to the inside of the front door, with an orange and a green marker we separated Something from Nothing. “This is Something,” we decided. “This is Nothing.” “Something.” “Nothing.” “Something.” “Nothing.” “Nothing.” “Nothing.” Everything was forever fixed, there would only be peace and happiness, it wasn’t until last night, our last night together, that the inevitable question finally arose, I told her, “Something,” by covering her face with my hands and then lifting them like a marriage veil. “We must be.” But I knew, in the most protected part of my heart, the truth.
I have so much to tell you, the problem isn’t that I’m running out of time, I’m running out of room, this book is filling up, there couldn’t be enough pages, I looked around the apartment this morning for one last time and there was writing everywhere, filling the walls and mirrors, I’d rolled up the rugs so I could write on the floor, I’d written on the walls and around the bottles of wine we were given but never drank, I wear only short sleeves, even when it’s cold, because my arms are books, too. But there’s too much to express. I’m sorry.
I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?
But still, it gave me heavy, heavy boots. Dad wasn’t a Great Man, not like Winston Churchill, whoever he was. Dad was just someone who ran a family jewelry business. Just an ordinary dad. But I wished so much, then, that he had been Great. I wished he’d been famous, famous like a movie star, which is what he deserved. I wished Mr. Black had written about him, and risked his life to tell the world about him, and had reminders of him around his apartment.
He took a picture of every doorknob in the apartment. Every one. As if the world and its future depended on each doorknob. As if we would be thinking about doorknobs should we ever actually need to use the pictures of them.
I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.
I adjusted the string so the keys—one to the apartment, one to I-didn’t-know-what—rested against my heart, which was nice, except the only thing was that it felt too cold sometimes, so I put a Band-Aid on that part of my chest, and the keys rested on that.
By the time the park found its current resting place, every single one of the children had fallen asleep, and the park was a mosaic of their dreams.
I lowered the volume until it was silent.
The same pictures over and over.
Planes going into buildings.
Bodies falling.
I want to stop inventing. If I could know how he died, exactly how he died, I wouldn’t have to invent him dying…There were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his.
I was in Dresden’s train station when I lost everything for the second time.
There won’t be enough pages in this book for me to tell you what I need to tell you, I could write smaller, I could slice the pages down their edges to make two pages, I could write over my own writing, but then what?
OSKAR SCHELL: SON
He needed me, and I couldn’t pick up. I just couldn’t pick up. I just couldn’t. Are you there? He asked eleven times. I know, because I’ve counted. It’s one more than I can count on my fingers….Sometimes I think he knew I was there. Maybe he kept saying it to give me time to get brave enough to pick it up.
Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It’s always necessary.
I love you,
Grandma
I’d have said “Dad?” backwards, which would have sounded the same as “Dad” forward.
He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in the can at the end to the beginning, from “I love you” to “Once upon a time…”
We would have been safe.
