Analysis Of Jonathan Safran Foer's Novel 'Everything Is Illuminated'

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Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated explores the way in which people deal with their own personal reality through three different narratives. Through these narratives the characterization and intentions of these characters are revealed. Within Everything is Illuminated coping mechanisms aid in developing how each of the characters interact as well as how the plot evolves. Yankel, Grandfather, and Alex all have a different conception of reality and cope with each differently. Firstly, Yankel’s entire life with Brod is, in a way, his imagination. As a disgrace to the shtetl Yankel has nothing he has to live up to or fulfill with his life, yet he strives to still present himself as a decent person. Yankel, a man seen as a cheater of the people, took the name of the man who helped persecute him in his case of corruption as well as took his wife. Brod’s miracle birth serves as a symbolism of rebirth. Brod who was born, “quite beautiful, well behaved, and not at all stinky” (Foer 21) reassured Yankel as not being his past and can now come into a …show more content…

In the Book of Dreams the dream of sex without pain can be applied to Alex’s life. As the dream says that the dreamer wants “a love that never withdrew” and that this painless sex was “not the feeling of completeness, but the feeling of not being empty” (Foer 37). Alex’s father withdrew love and replaced it with abuse for both him and Igor. In order to fill the void that Alex’s past created he uses sex to produce new masculinity and as well as the feeling of love. Humor is one of the main coping mechanisms. Though in the situation that Igor is in is the same that Alex is, instead of consoling him when Igor is crying in front of the television he just laughs because ‘as long as Igor is viewed as a man in society he will be

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