Exposé LELE meeting the other, love and friendship

Meeting the other, love and friendship

    The dossier under study tackles the notions of love and friendship, meaning feelings that can emerge when two persons meet for the first time.

For our analysis, we will focus on the moment in a story when a character experiences a feeling, whether it is love, happiness or even sadness for the first time in front of the reader.

Because often, it is this key moment that defines the character itself by setting a special relationship with the reader while also slowly building a more intimate atmosphere.

The three documents that we will study today represent the strong bound between the character and the reader created when the character reveals his weaknesses through the story especially when he experiences a loss.

Therefore we can ask ourselves : “how is the intimacy between the character and the reader created through the story ?”

In order to answer this question, we will first analyze the way the characters reveal their deepest feelings to the reader and then we will see how it brings the two of them even closer to each other.

    First of all, we studied two different extracts from the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2005.                                
This novel is narrated from the point of view of Oskar, a nine-year-old boy who struggles to cope with the tragic loss of his father but the story also gives readers a view of the September 11th attacks and what it is like to live in New York City at that time.

The first extract that we studied in class is the opening chapter of the novel, called “What the ?”.

We are introduced to a puzzling narrator who has a vivid imagination, for example when he says “I could invent a teakettle that reads in dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine”, which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which is a French expression that I know” but all of this contrasts with his long sentences which reflect a childish way of thinking. We are given here an example of a “stream of consciousness” narrative meaning that the character’s thoughts are not organized and it is the reader’s job to make sense out of it.

In that way, it is impossible for the reader to reach the true hidden aspect of Oskar, who is very mysterious and mostly intriguing.

But Oskar starts revealing his feelings when he talks about his different inventions made in his imagination, for example the little microphones that would play the sounds of our hearts through little speakers once they’re swallowed, or even the birdseed shirt for when you need to make a quick escape as humans don’t have their own wings.

Those evocations reveal that he truly cares about others and surprises us as we understand that our initial evaluation of the character was wrong.

Besides, the second excerpt from the first chapter of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close contrasts strongly with the previous one.                                                          
Oskar here describes the relationship he had with his dad and as a result, his sentences become clearer, for example he says “I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his t-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing”. 

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