The Silence Of The Grandfather's Amplified Silence

daunting mass, lies on the page something so obscured that it can only communicate Grandfather’s amplified silence (Foer, #). As Atchison notes on this occasion, “no room yields no voice” (Atchison, 365). In this instance, Grandfather’s representation of language serves as a symbolic release as he struggles to express the disorder that resulted from his personal trauma. The chaos of Grandfather’s communication, therefore, serves not only to emphasize the survivor’s linguistic processing of his psychological aftermath, but also the effect that takes place on the audience as they attempt to make sense of his coping method. In contrast to the silence that 9/11/03’s letter convey, the letter, “Why I’m Not Where You Are 4/12/78” bleeds with Grandfather’s

reading the account). This chapter is unique because of the graphic terms used here to describe the vivid and horrifying details of Grandfather’s experiences during the bombing raids in Dresden. Matthew Mullins (a doctoral student and instructor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro) notes that “Nowhere in the text does Oskar or any of the characters describe the horror of 9/11 in [such] graphic terms [as] used in both the account of the Japanese woman after Hiroshima and in Thomas Schell’s post-Dresden account” (Mullins 315-16). Among other traumatic experiences of that event, Grandfather morbidly outlines the actions he took in order to find his beloved Anna amidst the rubble that covered Dresden like blackened snow. He gruesomely describes how he was forced to kill animals in the zoo, as the zoo keeper begged him to do for him, as his own vision was burnt. Grandfather’s love for Anna and knowledge of their baby was enough motivation for him to leave his own begging parents. He burnt his hand on the

This erasure of language, however, more realistically symbolizes his inability to talk truthfully and accurately about his past traumatic events. He does not physically lose his voice, from what we know, or endure any physical injury that caused him to become mute. He claims that he lost language, not his voice, one word at a time: “I haven’t always been silent, I used to talk and talk and talk and talk, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, the silence overtook me like a cancer” (Foer 16). It is ironic, now, that he still “talks and talks and talks” but no longer using his voice to convey this “talk” but rather through the writings in his journal, in the letters, on his body, and on his wall. He swims in a sea of words as they wash off of him each day, and he sleeps in sheets of words as he has written all over his bedding. Early on in the text, Grandfather at one point recounts some of the words he lost: “‘I lost ‘carry,’ I lost the things I carried—‘daybook,’ ‘pencil,’ ‘pocket change,’ ‘wallet’—I even lost ‘loss’ (Foer 16–17). Mullins notes that “the loss of the word loss suggests a blurring of the lines between absence and loss” (Mullins 315). The action of losing something demands someone at fault, which Grandfather assumes is at his hands. He feels that not only are words absent from him, but that he lost them, just as lost Anna and their baby, and just as he loses her sister and their baby. Dominick LaCapra has discussed what