An "expert at watching": How to avoid connections and alienate people...

Through Foer’s last chapters of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he comments that without meaning, without expressing our true emotions, without love, we forget and regret our past, and our lives become insignificant. Foer relating traumatic events backwards, from both the Grandmother’s life and Oskar’s life contrasts the differences between their expression of love, and what the current consequences of these actions are. With the end line of “It’s always necessary. /I love you, /Grandma” (314), Foer expresses that this emotion is what holds our sanity together, and is the only “necessary” (314) way to live lives. The Grandmother, who does not express her emotions in the beginning of her life; the evident split of internal emotion, “I wanted to shout, It isn’t fair, and bag my fists against the table like a child” (307) and external calm reaction, “Everything special” (307) towards her husband, brings a sense of loss and unanchored existence in her world because she holds regret and the unspoken lie of unloving in her life. Because her life with her husband, a relationship built upon the safety of togetherness rather than the mutual exchange of emotions, the Grandmother cannot remember the loving relationship of her family, the small, insignificant details, such as the “front door of the house I grew up in” (308). Foer conveys by ingoing the presence of love in our lives and living in the past, we as people, stop the act of living, we merely become spectators in life, “an expert at watching” (309). However, though these last three chapters, Foer conveys that Oskar, who now carries the realization that there is someone in the world who loves him currently, not only in the past, can move on in his own life. In these chapters, Oskar is alluded to having a new beginning, realizing that he is not alone in his search for the lock to his key, his mother had known all along, and his idol, Stephen Hawking has written back to him after the countless generic form letters. Through these chapters, Foer develops Oskar as living with a new paradigm with life, that will help him emotionally to move on after the death of his father. Through these chapters, Oskar now realizes that he is not alone and insignificant in the world, but he is connected to others. Oskar is a new beginning. Instead of dwelling on the past events of his life without the ability to move on, he can remember the past of his life. “He said, Let there be light. And there was darkness. Oskar” (313). These are the words of his Grandmother, who could not let go of her losses of the past, but knows Oskar can, and will move on in his life. Both of these characters relive their past lives through these chapters, with events moving from current to the past. Foer writes that both of these characters finally have realized that connections to others, the abandonment of being "experts at watching", and expressing love will hold their lives together. With their mirroring final words of “I love you” (314, 326), and Oskar's last line of "We would have been safe" (326), convey the two character's realization of how love holds people extremely close to each other.