Narrative Space of Redemption in Post 9/11 Fiction: Analysis of Heteroglossia and Chronotope in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Abstract

American Jewish novelist Jonathan Safran Foer told the traumatic story of an ordinary American family by deconstructing the indecipherable 9/11 events in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. This article demonstrates how Foer echoes Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of chronotope through configuration of time and space in the text's representation of counter-narratives and traumatic discourse. Reflecting on the nature of humanity and postmodern context, Foer expresses his longing for redemption by exploiting multilayered and meta-textual narrative structure to construct the sense of narrative space of redemption. Moreover, within the novel Foer reinforces diverse traumatic narratives through juxtaposing the post 9/11 event with the past traumas such as the Dresden bombing in World War II. The novel further demonstrates this Bakhtinian concept in the representation of language and physical spaces, since Foer proposes the redemptive myth that dialogical narration and epistolary writing can heal past traumatic experience although the traumatic past is inexpressible.