Picturing Trauma: Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close As A Graphic Narrative

As one of the most representatives among the third-generation Jewish American novelists,Jonathan Safran Foer(1977 —)experimentally puts the visual artistics into the fictional narrative writing,creating the unique narrative in his works.In his second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,the text and the pictures serve as the independent narrative subjects,carrying part of the narrative respectively.Just as the text narrates the three generations’ family trauma,the pictures equally contribute to representing visually the damages brought by the war and terrorist attacks.This thesis comprehensively adopts the visual semiotics and trauma theories to explore the graphic narrative: the visualization of the textual narrative and the narrative of visuals are discussed so as to sum up the image-text relation in the trauma novel.Firstly,the special typography and layout “picture” the unique traumatic symptoms such as fracture,delay and alienation,constituting the visualization of the textual narrative.Then the visuals also go through the process of narrative,filling the gap of the traumatic representation and independently reproducing a visual storyline to picture the trauma.The text and pictures jointly narrate the unspeakable trauma and constitute a “readable” and “visible” narrative so that readers can fully immerse themselves in the traumatic scene.Ultimately,on the basis of the above analysis,it concludes that the dynamic image-text relation includes both division and cohesion,which makes a fit in both the form and content,forming a unique narrative tension in this trauma novel.Therefore,through the study of the visual representation of trauma and the image-text relation,the author holds the idea that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,as a spiritual and material organism,demonstrates that it’s necessary to use the graphic narrative to validify the trauma narrative,and the visualization of the trauma writing answers the question about how to present great historical traumas,hoping to open up a new mode of the trauma representation.