Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close-- still part #1 :)

     I am not completely possitive at this point if i am going to do an author study on Jonathan Safran Foer quite yet or not. I definately want to read all of his books, but am not entirely sure how to go about this just yet....
     This book starts very informally, no indent and very common, familiar language: a question even. It is written in a way that assumes the audience knows all of the preceding events and the reader is open-minded. It truly requires an outgoing-in-thoughts person to fully understand and dive into the casual introduction. The main character, Oskar Schell, is a young boy full of questions that are more thought-provoking and rhetorical than anything else. His insight draws the reader in deeper in hopes of comprehending his mindset. Oskar is dealing with the immense pain left behind from the loss of his father; he is coping by using memories and skills his dad left behind. On a quest to unravel a mystery he feels will bring him comfort, Oskar searches all of New York for answers his father (perhaps purposely) never attained.
     Jonathon Safran Foer has many unique techniques to engage the reader; he even combines pages of color and pictures to further lure the reader in. Almost every single line in the whole story has a purpose and contributes to the story as a whole. Throughout the story, there are breaks where the story becomes sidetracked into 'random' letters. The first, written to "my unborn child on 5/21/63," is a letter that is ironically connected to another letter later in the book, just as everything in the book is connected loosely by a simple strand of details. Foer uses interrupted paragraphs and thoughts to show the reader exactly how things happen, therefore allowing the reading to grasp every aspect of the plot.
    
---interesting clues and writers imagination I found----
- a whole page dedicated to the word 'purple' written in green
- main character was at an art supplies store and found his father's name written on every tab of paper used for testing colors: more than a year after he had died
- the letter written to the unborn child comes up again and reflects on a future letter from a concentration camp inmate, 30 years prior to the first letter.
- interesting how the language and pages are broken up so frequently- the style of how he writes is so different