Transcendental Intuition After 11/9: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Resumen

Many scholars deem the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers as the events that mark the demise of postmodernism. The dream is over and the age of irony has to make way for the era of earnestness. Suddenly, the banality of postmodern games does not fit inside the frame of the sense of loss of the American society. American authors must account for a new reality. In fact, they need to start striving towards the creation of that new reality to be able to manage the void of the era post 9/11. Many writers follow the path opened by David Foster Wallace in the previous decade in order to find a voice to speak about the sense of trauma and loss. Wallace uses honesty and sincerity to cope with the pervasive and destructive postmodern irony and he borrows many of the ideas from the American transcendentalist movement. In this light, our position is that many of the novels dealing with the loss and trauma of the era post 9/11 inherit that sincerity from Wallace and rely in American transcendentalism to be able to understand the new American reality. It is for this reason that we feel it fruitful to provide a brief analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly close (2005) to exemplify this theory.