Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

When Mr. Black leaves the expedition, Oskar is right back where he started, yet it feels so different: when he didn’t know there was an option besides searching alone, he didn’t realize he was lacking anything. But now, he feels like he’s lost something he didn’t know he was going to need. When Oskar goes to Grandma’s house, searching for some companionship, he instead finds empty envelopes where there should be letters, and again feels a loss for something he didn’t know existed. Again and again the novel creates powerful images of attempted but failed communication (a state that the novel seems to suggest is the natural state of all people, who are always failing to communicate with others in some way), and yet these failures do manage to communicate at least a form of love.

When Oskar meets Grandpa, Grandpa doesn’t tell him how they’re related: perhaps to spare both of them the pain of both connection and loss. Oskar realizes that the renter has the same first name as Dad, thus linking them in his mind but he doesn’t make the immediate assumption that they are related.

The door that Oskar feels between himself and the renter gives another significance to the images of the doorknobs in the text. When Oskar crosses the threshold into the guest room, they begin to connect.

Even though Oskar doesn’t know who the renter is, he is ready to accept him as a father figure: his relationship with Mr. Black as well as his ability to open up to other people throughout the course of his expedition has given him the ability to share his story and unlock some of his feelings to the renter. Crossing the Staten Island Ferry represents another one of Oskar’s fears that he had to conquer to continue on his quest. Oskar’s desire to find the lock to fit the key overrides his smaller anxieties.

At the beginning of the chapter, Oskar says that Mr. Black has quit the quest, but he doesn’t tell us why until he tells Grandpa the story. Many of the important events of the novel occur in this way: the consequence is told, but the why and how is not revealed until much later. Here, Jonathan Safran Foer frames the flashback of Ruth on the Empire State Building within the story of the expedition as Oskar relays it to the renter, not at the same time as Oskar is living it.

Just as Mr. Black has been living an extremely full life, even though he’s been in his apartment for decades, Ruth has been living an extremely full life, even though she’s been in exactly the same space for decades. Ruth knows about every nook and cranny of the Empire State Building, just as Mr. Black knows every story behind the many mementoes that fill his apartment.

Ruth Black, just like Mr. Black, has stayed in one place because she is still waiting for her husband, even though he’s dead: she doesn’t want to emerge into the real world, where she might feel his loss more profoundly. Magical thinking is a key component of how many characters in the novel relate to the dead: Mr. Black nails a nail every day to a tree to commemorate his wife’s death; Oskar keeps his Dad’s voice on the answering machine in his closet; Grandpa writes letters to his unborn son.

Mr. Black has finished searching because he’s found something: Ruth, who he plans to visit every afternoon. Oskar frequently expresses his most violent emotions in imagination, rather than in reality: though he is mad enough to scream an obscenity in thought to Mr. Black, he bottles that up inside, like one of his many bruises, and silently holds the pain.

Oskar usually plans every step he takes far in advance, but his desire to show Grandpa the answering machine surprises himself: it is as though he is finally ready to help lessen his own burden of guilt by letting others help carry some of the load. Grandpa tries to hint obliquely at his identity by asking Oskar about his grandfather, but Oskar doesn’t pick up the hint.

Oskar thinks that if he knows how his Dad dies, he can assuage some of his guilt, because he can stop imagining the worst: it’s worse to not know what happened and constantly have to live in limbo than to know and to be able to deal with hard, scientific facts. The photograph of Grandpa’s hands spreads across both pages of the novel, giving equal weight to each hand: YES and NO appear to be simultaneously true, creating both the sensations of certainty and uncertainty.

Grandpa doesn’t want to cross the line—both literally and metaphorically—into Grandma’s territory: he wants to proceed carefully and do what she has permitted him to do, rather than overstep rules by having too close a relationship with Oskar.

The image of a skyscraper with a hole in the middle for a plane to fly through, in addition to presenting a fantastical solution to reverse-engineer Dad’s death, also echoes the image of the Sixth Borough floating through the ocean with a hole in the center, and to Oskar who feels he has a hole, the absence of his father, in his heart.