Final Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 12

Final - Essay Example In particular, â€Å"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close† by Jonathan Safran Foer appears to be the fusion of text and visual aids. As it is a literary work, text plays the leading role in rendering the ideas, while visual aids perform the supporting role and enhance the story telling by means of specifying and illustrating the narration. In accordance with McCloud, text and pictures interrelate in several ways in a piece. Despite the fact that McCloud discusses mostly graphic novels, or comics, his ideas can be applied to the novel under consideration as well. Based on McCloud’s work titled â€Å"Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art†, there are two types of text and photo combinations in â€Å"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close†, such as word specific combination and additive combination. The first type of text and photo combination presupposes that pictures mostly illustrate what is discussed in the novel. One of the best examples of the use of photos in terms of illustrations is Oskar’s visit to the art supply store where the boy sees his father’s name (actually his grandfather’s name) written on the writing pads. The photos of writing pads are placed in the novel to illustrate that â€Å"most people write the name of the color of the pen they’re writing withâ €  and back up the manager’s words (Foer). Apart from that, these photos reveal no information. The second example is Oskar’s scrap book â€Å"Stuff That Happened to Me†. For the boy, the book is of great importance for it bears valuable memories. Put exactly in this part of the novel, however, the scrap book can be regarded as the illustration of what is happening in Oskar’s head at a particular moment in bed at night. â€Å"Stuff That Happened to Me† is the montage of photos (keys, Oskar’s fingerprints, Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull etc.) which reflects the welter of confused ideas and the boy’s state of perplexity at that very moment. The