Puzzles and Cleverness Theme Analysis

Puzzles offer a comforting alternative to disasters that don’t make sense: puzzles suggest that life has answers, and that even the scariest situations will have a solution in the end. Puzzles might seem like a light-hearted pastime, but Oskar takes puzzles extremely seriously. When Oskar discovers the key in his Dad’s room, he turns it from a random object into a quest. The key is in a little envelope labeled “Black,” and Oskar decides that the he’s going to discover who Black is by tracking down everyone in New York with that last name. Oskar’s self-assigned mission to unlock the mystery of the key becomes an elaborate journey that takes him around every corner of every borough of New York.

Oskar’s clearly a very precocious kid: he has an enormous vocabulary, and he proofreads the New York Times to relax. Puzzles have always been the way Oskar deals with sensory overload, or things that might be too complicated for him to grasp fully on his own. Oskar’s Dad used to send Oskar on elaborate “Reconnaissance Missions” throughout the city, turning the potentially overwhelming landscape of New York into a treasure hunt. The puzzle also becomes a tribute to Oskar’s Dad, or, in a type of irrational thinking, a way of keeping his Dad alive: if Oskar can believe that his Dad set him up on this quest, then his Dad still remains a part of his life.

The form of the plot is a lot like a puzzle. Even though the main narrator is nine-year-old Oskar, Foer includes several letters and notebook entries written by other characters. Oskar’s Grandpa writes letters to his son, who is either Oskar’s Dad or the unborn baby who died at Dresden. Figuring out what’s going on with the story of these other characters creates mini-quests within the main quest of the book (that is, to find out the mystery of the key). And there are puzzles within these other sub-plots. One of the letters from Oskar’s grandfather to Oskar’s dad is covered with red ink: Grammatical and spelling mistakes get circled, but lots of random and not-so-random words (like “love” and “father”) are also circled. The editing marks make the letter into a puzzle: the circles and underlines make it seem like there’s a hidden message that the reader has to decipher, even if the code is difficult to crack.

The style of the book is also puzzle-like. Jonathan Safran Foer sticks photographs and images directly into the book, like a rebus puzzle. For example, there are photos of things like doorknobs, keys, paper airplanes, Hamlet, and Stephen Hawking that crop up in the middle of the story. Many of the images seem like they’re meant to be from Oskar’s binder, which he calls “Stuff That Happened to Me,” even though most of the things in it only “happened” to Oskar in his mind, or by association.