COLOURS

When we read novels, we usually don't come across colours, unless they are in encyclopedias or comics. However, we do find colour in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. I remember a friend of mine leafing through the book and looking angrily at me, saying: "Did you write on the pages with a red pen!? That's not nice!!" Well, I didn't. It was printed this way.

However, red is not the only colour we find printed on the pages of this 'graphic novel'. We find many colours, almost all of them concentrated in the span of four pages. These four pages are meant to be the pad of paper on which people test the pens they want to buy in the stationary shop that Oskar visits. According to the shop assistant, most people write either their names or the name of the colour which they are writing with, as we can see represented on  these four pages of the novel.

In the context of the story, red has a very specific use. Early on in the novel we are told how Oskar's dad used to read newspapers just for the sake of finding mistakes in the text, something in which he always succeeded. He liked circling the errors he found with his red pen. In the story, we find only two documents marked with red circles: one is a piece of news and the other is the only letter that Oskar's father got to read from his father.

EFFECT: while colours in general, such as those written on the pad, serve to illustrate, and maybe even challenge readers to find "Thomas Schell's" name on it, red has a much more powerful meaning. The fact that Oskar's father used a red pen to circle the mistakes he found in the newspapers is crucial when we are presented with the letter his father wrote to him. In this letter, he does the same thing with it and finds many mistakes. However, these are are not always necessarily mistakes in grammar or punctuation, but often mistakes in meaning. For example, when he circles "my child" and "I love you, Your father", we wonder how this can possibly be a mistake? Perhaps he feels as though his father has not the right to say such things or perhaps even as though it is a mistake to use the title 'father' when he has been so very absent in his life. Here, Safran chooses a very powerful way to express Tom Schell's feelings which, of course, each of us may interpret differently.