The Punctuation Of Heart Disease By Jonathan Safran Foer

Silence is defined as when there is an absence of sound, but there is more to it. During silence a lot of the times people have no idea about what to say or what would be the appropriate thing to do. The short story, “A primer for the Punctuation of Heart disease,” by Jonathan Safran Foer, revolves around a boy named Jonathan, whose family has lack of communication which has caused distance in familial relationships. The story consists of different Punctuations that most audiences are unfamiliar with and the meanings that he gives revolves around how his life is spent in silence. Foer uses a system of notations to convey the message that silence is a way to run away from reality, remain stuck in memories of the past and keep emotions hidden.

When explaining one of the symbols Foer implicitly defines how lonely Jonathan is and how he has yet to find love. Foer writes, “I often inflict willed silences upon my mother when she asks about my relationships with girls. Perhaps this is because I never have relationships with girls- only relations” (2). The fact that Jonathan remains silence when his mother asks him about his girlfriend is due to his inability to cope up with the reality. If Jonathan tells his mom that he does not have girlfriend it would be him basically admitting that he is lonely. So what he does in order to avoid thinking about true love is to have weak sex all the time. Foer states, “ It depresses me to think that I’ve never had sex with anyone who really loved me. Sometimes I wonder if having sex with a girl who doesn’t love me is like felling a tree, alone, in a forest: No one hears about it; it didn’t happen” ( 2). Foer is avoiding the fact that he has no one that truly cares about him or loves him in the way that he wants. Any other person would try to find the girl, but by having one night stands with other girls he tries to find his love but he is not able to. He compares himself to a fallen tree in a forest because there is no one to share his problems with because of the broken family. Jonathan knows that having one night stand is not ideal, but he still does it to escape his love story that has yet to come. Foer’s idea about using silence to escape reality is commensurate with Lahiri’s views on the same subject matter the only difference is that she explicitly mentions her point of view unlike Foer. Kaushik, after finding out that his stepsisters discovered his mother’s picture, runs away from home because he does not want her stepsisters to find out how pretty her mother was because he is unable to accept Chitra as her stepmother. Lahiri states, “My