Everything is Illuminated, Lesson 3 and 4

Everything is Illuminated: Lesson 3

1. Lack of linear direction in the plot

● we see this first in when Brod looks through a telescope: “she lifts a powerful telescope to find herself (87) and sees the photograph of Safran and Augustine (88) and learns of her own rape that is recorded in the Book of Antecedents (89).

● when this rape is dealt with later, it only occurs in the space of one line, because we have already learnt about it: “ignored them even when they made a woman out of her” (96). There will be more discussion of this rape later through the technique of flashback, and we will later read the full account of this rape as it is recorded in the Book of Antecedents.

● Brod looking through her telescope into the future is different than traditional foreshadowing or hints about what will come later

● we see more traditional foreshadowing when Jonathan writes “my great-great-great-great-great grandfather swam back to shore, pumping the golden sack above his head” (94). By referring to Shalom (the Kolker) as his ancestor, we know that he will later marry Brod.

So, instead of telling history in a strictly accurate and linear manner, we have more of a poetic or fantastical history that often involves playing around with timelines. History is being told in a postmodern rather than realist manner.

● we certainly see this with the story of Trachimday creating an illumination in the sky 150 years later

● “From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistake for light – a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes ... We're here the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here and we're alive (95- 96)

● Trachimday day light is seen in the moonwalk in 1966 (98).

● collapse of fact / fiction (actual historical events and places with non-accurate and non-realistic elements) as well as a blending of past, present, and future

● “Like Yankel, she repeats things until they are not true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert on confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be (87).

● this blending is also a result of the undetermined nature of the past : can we really know what happened for sure? : “This plaque marks the spot (or a spot close to the spot) where the wagon of one Trachim B (we think) went in” (93).

2. Alex's character: humourous yet also insightful.

● definition of a writer as someone who writes fast (100)

● Jonathan begins to appear as foolish as well (it is not only Alex). He wants certain scenes changed so that he looks better, but this would involve him speaking Ukrainian, and there are some problems in the logic of this change, that Alex points out (101)

● Alex also proves himself to be quite insightful at times: see his remarks and insights into Brod's character and on the nature of love (103), his comments on the lost history of Trachimbrod (115) and lies (117)

● his inflated persona that we saw at the beginning of the novel will later begin to reveal itself as a fabrication: “I have never been carnal with a girl” (144).

● fiction and storytelling is a way to create a persona that one wants for oneself and to please other people: “I think that this is why I relish writing for you so much. It makes it possible for me to be not like I am, but as I desire for Little Igor to see me (144).

● does or can a fictional persona replace or correct the “authentic” self? : “I beseech you to make us better than we are. Make us good” (145).

Everything is Illuminated: Lesson 4

1. Time shifts: Past, present, future

● When we enter into the section entitled “The Dial,” we have suddenly in 1941 with no explanation

● later on, Alex acts as a stand-in for the reader, and expresses some of the confusion that the reader likely feels: “as for your story, I will tell you that I was at first a very perplexed person. Who is this new Safran, and Dial, and who is becoming married? (142). Alex also reminds Jonathan of his historical inaccuracies about the saw (142). Keep in mind that Jonathan is not aiming to be historically “accurate.”

● this change in time undermines or compromises the climax of finding Augustine (?) at the end of the previous section (118) – the reader likely expects to hear more about this but Foer holds off on following through with the expectations that he has created

● we are learning about Safran (Jonathan's grandfather and his wedding), and through a flashback (?) we learn about the Kolker's accident (“He was to fulfill the sacred ritual that had been fulfilled by every married man in Trachimbrod since his great-great-great-grandfather's tragic flour mill accident” (120). We haven't learnt about this accident yet, so is this flashback actually an example of foreshadowing? --- confusion of clear forward and backward motion along a linear plot

● Brod's rape is finally clarified for us: “She hadn't cried since that Trachimday five years before, when on the way home from the float she was stopped by the mad squire Sofiowka N, who made a woman of her” (131). (this is a clear flashback, but the event itself was first introduced to us in a bizarre twist on foreshadowing)

● The face of the Kolker gets remade as it gets rubbed off. It gets remade in accordance with what his offspring look like: the present creates what past: “For each recasting, the craftsmen modeled the Dial's face after the faces of his male descendants – reverse heredity” (140)

● this negates the previous idea that Safran is falling in his ancestor's footsteps: “he was growing into his place in the family, he looked unmistakably like his father's father's father's father ... he was granted a place in a long line – certain assurances of being and permanence, but also a burdensome restriction of movement. He was not altogether free (121).

● Alex: “everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was” (145)

● the past and the present seem to be connected together in a chain: “ so my young grandfather knelt - a perfectly unique link in a perfectly uniform chain – almost 150 years after his Brod saw the Kolker illuminated at her window” (140), but which end of the chain is the beginning or the starting point???

2. The nature of love

● how is love being defined in the novel?

● Brod's love for her father, and love in general: “Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest and the same time. She felt as if she was brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release ... she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love – loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about” (79- 80)

● Brod's love for the Kolker : “This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even than you love his presence? (121).

● Brod wants to be loved like a child is loved: she does not want serious discussions or other intellectual matters: (123, 125). What does she want? Does she want a partner in life?

● She thinks violence is love: 129-130

● impossibility of love at all: 132

● love seems to be possiible in the light of unpleasant truths, and this is connected to time stopping: “He pressed his lips to the hole: Yankel was not your real father. The minutes were unstrung. They fell to the floor and rolled through the house, losing themselves. I love you, she said, and for the first time in her life, the words had meaning” (139).

● lies and deception, though, seem to play important roles and are sometimes necessary (though they may hurt the liar or the ones they lie to): “not-truths hung in front of me like fruit. Which could I pick for the hero? Which could I pick for Grandfather? Which for myself?” (117).

● is humor the only truthful way to tell a story (Alex on p 53) or does humor lessen reality and protect us from reality by allowing us to distance ourselves from it? “I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is … But now I think it's the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world” (158).

● is Yankel himself able to tell unpleasant truths to his daughter? (77)

More dualities: (track these through the novel)

● the Kolker's split personality and split head

● absence / presence:

● “This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even than you love his presence?” (121).

● “They lived with the hole. The absence that defined it became a presence that defined them” (135).

● “She was learning [that the hole] is not the exception in life, but the rule. The hole is no void; the void exists around it” (139).