Extremely loud blog- Muzamil

1) This week, we read the first 107 pages of “Extremely loud and incredibly close”. This story is told in the first person point of view. The person who’s point of view that the story is told from is actually Oskar, the main character in the story. However, there are also two chapters where the story is told from his grandparents’ perspective. These chapters seem to be their life story so I think that ill be continue on in parallel with the story Oskar is going through. The way that this affects the reading is that if I can never be sure whose perspective the story is being told from. It usually takes a couple of confusing paragraphs to find out that the perspective has switched from Oskar to someone else.

2) Oskar Schell is the main character in this novel. He is a nine year old boy and seem to incredibly smart. Oskar lives with his mom and his Grandmother who he is really close to lives across the street. Oskar’s father died recently from the 9/11 attacks. Oskar was incredibly close to his father and they shared many things in common. In the story, the thing that Oscar is looking for is any connection that he can find with his dad, the name black, and the odd looking key. For this, Oskar has created a plan to talk to and ask ever person that he can find whose last name is Black and get some kind of information about the key that he found in the envelope in the blue vase on the top self. However, metaphorically we can see that there is a lot more to Oskar’s search than the key and what it opens. In fact, I believe that Oskar is looking for some kind of connection to his dad. Some way of trying to get rid of the pain and loneliness that he gets without him. And some way to not miss him as much as he does. The whole search I think is a search for what Oskar is going to do without his dad.

3) There are many pictures in the novel, some of which connect to the story while others seem almost random. One picture that stood out most in my mind was on page 49. This is the page of people who have tested pens and different colored pens and markers. I was interesting to me how there was a connection made by the store manager about how most people write a color with the same colored pen. For example as we can see on the several displays that every color that is written is written in the color that is spells. Another interesting part about this picture and how is connects to the story was how Oskar found his Dads name written on almost all the displays but the manager could not find that he had bought anything from the store.