earticle

영어

This paper explores the idea of community in Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, particularly focusing on how it attempts to imagine a new form of community different from the pervasive notion of patriotic national community that has gained strong currency since the 9/11 incident in 2001. The community presented in the text provides a form of membership through mourning, but this membership is not dictated by nationality, racial demarcation, or any pre-determined notions of identity. By sharing loss and pain with complete strangers and thus realizing the fluid yet continuing connection that we all share in a society, the characters show that collective mourning can be an alternative form of communal identity to the rigid boundary of national community. The idea of communal membership through mourning in the text is very much in the same line with Judith Butler’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories, which theoretically outline the communal relationality containing Otherness. This paper attempts to show that the community presented in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close encapsulates these theories, creating through literary imagination a mourning community that does not require fixed boundaries or any label of homogeneous membership.