Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Oskar is the narrator in this chapter. Oskar remembers reading the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was alive, and they discuss doing something relatively insignificant: even though it might seem miniscule in the scope of the universe, it’s still something. In this spirit, Oskar decides to meet all the Blacks alphabetically, from Aaron to Zyna.

Oskar puts together a field kit, including a flash light, ChapStick, his cell phone, iodine pills, and the script of Hamlet. It takes Oskar three hours and forty-one minutes to walk to Queens, where Aaron Black lives. There’s a photograph of a suspension bridge inserted here. Oskar won’t take public transportation, and even though walking over bridges also makes him panicky, public transportation is worse.

Oskar makes it to Queens and buzzes for A. Black. Oskar asks the man who answers if he knows Thomas Schell. The man says “no” and soon gets off the buzzer. Oskar starts to cry, but then rings the buzzer again and tells the man that his Dad is dead. The man says that if Oskar comes up, he’ll look at the key, but since he’s hooked up to several machines, he can’t come down. Oskar is scared to go up to the ninth floor, where the man lives, so he leaves his card under the apartment building door and goes away.

Oskar walks for two hours and twenty-three minutes to get to Abby Black’s house on Bedford Street. A sign above the door says that it’s the narrowest house in New York and that Edna Saint Vincent Millay once lived there. (There’s a photograph of the house in the chapter.) Oskar knocks, and Abby Black, a beautiful woman who looks very sad, answers. Abby says she’s in the middle of something, but Oskar lies and tells her that he’s diabetic and needs sugar, and she lets him in. He makes a mental vow to donate his allowance to a fund for diabetes.

A man calls from the other room, but Abby doesn’t pay attention. When Oskar finds a bit of dust in the kitchen, Abby gets embarrassed, causing Oskar to launch into statistics about the amount of dust his apartment had produced in a year (112 pounds). Abby puts out the cup of coffee Oskar had requested and a bowl of strawberries.

Oskar compliments Abby on a photograph of an elephant hanging on the wall, causing him to launch into a long discussion of random elephant facts. Oskar gets close to the picture and takes a photograph of its eye with his camera, and there’s a photograph of a close-up elephant’s eye inserted in the chapter.

Abby begins to cry. Her husband continues to yell, and she continues to ignore him. Oskar tells her that’s he’s twelve, because “I wanted to be old enough for her to love me.” He asks again if Abby knew his Dad, Thomas Schell, and again, she says no. When he shows her the key, she also says that she doesn’t know anything about that.

Oskar invites Abby to the fall play his class is putting on, Hamlet, which will be performed in twelve weeks’ time, and she says she’ll try to come. He also asks if he can kiss her, but she refuses. She does let him take a picture of her, but not of her face, so he takes a picture of the back of her head. The photograph is inserted in the text. Oskar give her his business card, which is also printed in the chapter; it has many occupations from “inventor” and “jewelry designer” to “amateur astronomer.”

Oskar goes over to Grandma’s apartment when he gets home. She’s just been crying. She tells Oskar she was talking to the renter.

Oskar remembers that Grandma used to take care of him when he was a baby. Once, he made her panic because he was hiding from her. Ever since, whenever one of them says the other’s name, the other person has to say, “I’m OK.”

After Dad died, Oskar explains to the reader, Oskar and his Mom went to Oskar’s Dad’s storage facility, where Oskar found the old walkie-talkies that they had had to monitor Oskar as a baby. Oskar gave one to his Grandma, and now they talk on them all the time; in fact, she’s usually waiting on the other end for him. There’s a photograph of Grandma’s apartment window in the chapter.

Oskar remembers how his Grandma knits him white clothes and finds special things for him. She gave Oskar a stamp collection when he mentions that he was considering starting one, but he yelled at her when she says she’d gotten rid of the plate block. They spend time together constantly, but Oskar still doesn’t know about her past.

That night, Oskar stays up designing jewelry, and he can’t stop thinking about his Dad’s storage facility. He can’t sleep, so he goes to Mom’s room and watches her sleep. He wakes her up and asks what the storage facility was called, hoping for something with the word “Black,” but instead, she tells him that it’s “Store-a-Lot.”