Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

This letter has the same date as the letter from Chapter 2, and it’s by the same narrator—that is, Grandpa—writing to his son. The letter begins with a long, stream-of-consciousness description of the many rules that the writer and his wife (Grandma) follow in their marriage, from never talking about the past to changing the sheets every morning. In the middle of the list of rules, which range from mundane and logical to trivial to absurd, the narrator slips in the phrase, “I’m leaving her today.”

Grandpa writes that he thought he and Grandma could have had a beautiful reunion, although they had hardly known each other in Dresden, but it didn’t work. He describes the “Nothing Places” in their apartment, which are designated zones in which one person is allowed to disappear while the other person doesn’t look. Soon, the apartment becomes more Nothing than Something. They designate every area of the apartment as “Something” and “Nothing,” and they try to pretend that this will make them happy, but he knows that their marriage is falling apart.

Grandpa says that he’s writing from the airport to his unborn son, thinking about Anna. He says that his father knew Anna’s father. When they met for the first time, they were teenagers, and the narrator was immediately in love. He walks to her house the next day, filled with self-consciousness, but she’s not home. There’s a photograph of a doorknob in the chapter.

Day after day, Grandpa walked to Anna’s house, but she’s never home. As it turns out, she was never home because she had been walking to his house at the same time every day, and never finding him at home, because he had been coming to see her.

There’s a piece of paper from Grandpa’s daybook inserted—“Do you know what time it is?—and the narration returns to the present. He thinks about Grandma at home, writing her whole life story on a typewriter. She protests that her eyes are bad, but nevertheless, he convinces her to do it, and she writes diligently for years.

One spring, Grandma pulls him into the guest room and shows him a stack of paper, which she tells him is called “My Life.” The stack of pages is completely blank: years ago, he had pulled the ribbon from the typewriter and hadn’t replaced it, and her eyes were so bad that she’d never noticed. Jonathan Safran Foer includes a few blank sheets in the chapter. Grandpa can’t bear to tell Grandma that the pages are all blank, so he tells her that it’s wonderful.

After another piece of paper from Grandpa’s daybook that reads “Do you know what time it is?”, the narrator reminisces about the first time that he and Anna made love. It was in her father’s shed, which he’d converted into a library. In the yard nearby, Anna’s father meets them. Anna introduces Grandpa to Simon Goldberg, her father’s friend, and Grandpa tells Goldberg that he is trying to be a sculptor. Anna’s father and Goldberg talk about the war, and Anna and Grandpa go into the library and make love.

There is another sheet from Grandpa’s daybook that reads “Do you know what time it is?”, and the narration returns to the near present, when Grandpa is reading Grandma’s life story and pretending to laugh or to cry in front of her, when in reality, the pages are just blank.

Grandpa writes that he’s sorry for everything—sorry for the marriage, sorry for being about to leave Grandma, sorry about Anna, sorry he’ll never get to see his son. In the chapter, there is another photograph of a doorknob. Grandpa writes that he will rip these pages out, put them in the mailbox, and address the envelope to “My Unborn Son.” There are a few more pages from the daybook with one sentence apiece on them, ending with, “You’re going to catch a cold.”