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Summary: Chapter 10

Throughout this chapter, phrases are circled in red, primarily to mark errors, but sometimes for unknown reasons. 

Thomas writes from a library that stands where Anna’s father’s shed once was. Every day he writes his son a letter but has never sent any of them. 

When Anna gives Thomas the typewriter Grandma later uses for her memoir, Anna wants him to write her a letter. Thomas writes about fanciful homes the two of them will live in one day. When he gives the letter to Anna, she tells him she’s pregnant. Thomas kisses her and her stomach. He never sees her again.

When the air raid sirens go off, everyone assumes it’s a drill. Thomas sees flares drop and runs into the shelter. After the bombing, only the façade of Thomas’s house remains. Thomas decides to find Anna. His parents beg him to stay, but he refuses and grabs the doorknob to close the door. The metal burns his hands. He never sees his family again.

On his way to Anna’s, the second bombing hits. Thomas passes the zoo, where all the cages have opened. The zookeeper, whose eyes have burnt shut, needs help shooting the carnivores. Thomas doesn’t know which are the carnivores, so the keeper tells him to shoot everything. Thomas shoots all the animals. 

Thomas reaches the Loschwitz Bridge and collapses. He awakens in a hospital, where a nurse has strapped his hands down to keep him from hurting himself. When he’s released, he searches for his family, Anna, and the letter’s addressee to no avail. He finds the typewriter and carries it with him.

The last time Thomas sees Anna she tells him life is scarier than death. Anna’s dad gives him a letter from Simon Goldberg, who’s been sent to Westerbork Transit Camp. The letter expresses hope that Simon will see Thomas again.

Thomas wonders if he’d be with his child and Grandma now if he’d told Grandma about Anna’s pregnancy and that he was afraid to lose another thing he loved.

Summary: Chapter 11

Oskar’s dad tells this story the night before he dies. 

The Sixth Borough was an island separated from Manhattan by a channel of water that the person with the world long jump record could leap over. Once a year, the long jumper would leap, and New Yorkers would celebrate. 

One year, the jumper’s toe skims the water. Everyone realizes that the borough is drifting away. The tradition continues, but each year the jumper has a harder time. Finally, he can’t make the jump anymore. The bridges between Manhattan and the borough crumble. The borough loses electricity and uses jarred fireflies for light. 

Engineers examine the problem but discover that the borough wants to leave. New York tries to keep the borough there by chaining it to no avail. 

A boy and a girl communicate between Manhattan and the Sixth Borough through a tin can telephone, but it gets harder to hear each other. The boy, who lives in the Sixth Borough, asks the girl to say, “I Love You.” She shouts it, and the boy puts a lid on the can, detaches it from the string, and puts it on a shelf. He can’t remove the lid lest her words escape. 

The people of the Sixth Borough don’t want to leave because they don’t want change. New York decides to save the Sixth Borough’s Central Park. Using giant hooks, they drag the park to Manhattan. Children are allowed to lie down on the park as it’s moved. The city pulls them to Manhattan and adulthood. 

Oskar argues that there wasn’t really a sixth borough. His dad asks if he’s an optimist or a pessimist. Oskar says he’s an optimist. His dad explains that because there’s no evidence either way, an optimist can find hope that the borough is real. Oskar asks his dad what he believes. His dad says that even the most pessimistic person feels like they’re both in the present and somewhere else while in Central Park.

Summary: Chapter 12

On 9/11, Grandma was in the guest room watching television. Oskar’s mom calls to ask if she’s heard from Oskar’s dad. Grandma learns he had a meeting in the World Trade Center. Oskar’s mom tells Grandma to watch Oskar and not let him see the news. For the first time, Oskar’s mom tells Grandma she loves her.

Stan, the doorman, asks Grandma why her arm is bleeding. Grandma doesn’t know why she’s bleeding, but at that moment, she realizes her son is dead.

Oskar hides under the bed. Grandma asks if she can join him, and she squeezes next to him. She tells him his mom is on the way home. Oskar says dad will be home as soon as he can close up the store. 

When Oskar’s mom gets home, Grandma tells her there are no messages on the phone. Oskar asks if his dad was at the building, and his mom says no. Grandma realizes that Oskar knows his dad is dead.

Oskar’s mom calls the police and fire department, but no one knows anything. She makes posters with a photo of Oskar’s dad, arguing with Grandma over which picture to use. Grandma wonders where Thomas is.

Grandma spends the afternoon with Oskar. The same images play on TV. Oskar’s mom comes home and tries to get Grandma to go to sleep. Grandma tells her she loves her. 

Grandma explains that when she watched Oskar’s play, she realized that everything she’d lived through was necessary so that Oskar would be born. 

Oskar’s mom wants to have a funeral even though there’s no body. As Grandma watches Oskar try to make the limo driver laugh, she knows that Oskar’s suffering.

There’s a letter waiting from Grandma when she returns from the funeral. Grandma asks Oskar to read it. All it says is, “I’m sorry.” Thomas has only sent her empty envelopes for thirty years, but she knows his writing. 

Analysis: Chapters 10-12

Thomas’s story about the bombing of Dresden in Chapter 10 further exposes his inability to live in the present. Thomas has returned not only to Dresden, the site of his past, but to Anna’s father’s shed, a site he connects to Anna and their past happiness. Thomas writes this letter, in which he reveals so many secrets, at the site where he once allowed himself to be vulnerable with Anna, implying again that he’s left his ability to be vulnerable in the past. Later in the letter, Thomas slips up and claims that he’s searched for Anna and “you,” the letter’s addressee, conflating his real, present son with the potential child Anna never had. The slippage between children echoes Thomas’s attempt to replace Anna with Grandma because he doesn’t want to open himself to new intimacy and vulnerability in the present because, as he concludes in this letter, he doesn’t want to lose more loved ones. However, even within the letter, Thomas illustrates the self-harm he’s inflicted by shutting people out in the anecdote about the doorknobs. Thomas literally tries to close the door on his family who loves him in favor of hopelessly pursuing Anna, and he burns himself in the process. 

Thomas’s incident at the zoo illustrates the ways violent acts often have casualties beyond those intended. The zookeeper wants Thomas to shoot the carnivorous animals, who could theoretically cause more carnage during the chaos of the bombing, but because Thomas cannot single out the carnivores, he must shoot even harmless animals. Similarly, although Thomas lives in Nazi Dresden, his family and Anna’s family are not the aggressors of World War II; they are not carnivores. Yet, like the harmless zoo animals, their families become casualties of an effort to eliminate aggressors. This incident evokes the interview with Tomoyasu that Oskar plays. Japan was also an Axis power during World War II, but Tomoyasu and her daughter were innocent casualties. Through these parallels, the novel suggests that war without innocent casualties is impossible. These historical instances of violence also mirror Oskar’s imagined outburst during the play, where his desire to attack someone who actively bullies him eventually turns into rage toward people he loves very dearly, like his grandma and dad. Here, Foer ties preemptive violence, even for protective reasons, to nihilism and a lack of concern for human life. In the zoo incident, even protective intentions have unintended and tragic consequences.

The Sixth Borough fable serves as an allegory for the necessity of letting go of the past and embracing the future. The Sixth Borough ultimately leaves Manhattan because it doesn’t want to change, even preferring life without electricity to moving forward. We also see this attitude in the boy who keeps his friend’s love in a jar. In bottling her statement, the boy never gets to hear it, sacrificing a future moment of hearing her voice in favor of trying to preserve a fleeting past. Oskar’s dad further ties the Sixth Borough’s rejection of the future to childhood. For example, the Sixth Borough copes with its loss of modernity by relying on toys, like fireflies in jars or tin can telephones. However, despite the immaturity of the Sixth Borough, Oskar’s dad uses a wistful and nostalgic tone to describe it, treating it as something beautiful that nevertheless remains out of reach. In his statement to Oskar that even a pessimist finds signs of the Sixth Borough in Central Park, it is clear that Oskar’s dad has never advocated a nihilistic approach to the world but instead encouraged Oskar to allow for the possibility of hope and wonder, even if it seems old-fashioned or immature. 

Grandma’s description of the Schell family’s 9/11 experience demonstrates how fear and vulnerability bring loved ones closer. Cognizant of Oskar’s youth and therefore fragility, Grandma and Oskar’s mom both rush to protect him with comforting lies. As Grandma intuits, Oskar knows his dad has died, but he also lies in order to protect Grandma. The characters lie in recognition of each other’s feelings, knowing a loved one’s vulnerability and trying to protect one another. Oskar’s mom and Grandma argue about which image of Oskar’s dad to put on his missing poster, focusing on something superficial and trivial instead of the horrors of what has just happened. They could not control what happened on 9/11, but they can exercise control over which photo to use. Although lying ultimately fails to protect anyone, Grandma treats these lies and squabbles fondly because of the love they represent. Instead of this argument dividing them, Grandma and Oskar’s mom use it to protect and distract each other. Furthermore, this frightening day marks the first time Oskar’s mom and Grandma tell each other they love each other because this day has brought them in touch with their own mortality. As we’ve seen throughout the novel, an important part of love is being vulnerable with each other, and Grandma’s and Oskar’s mom’s grief has brought them closer through shared vulnerability.

Grandma’s recognition that the past creates the present offers yet another model for coping with grief. Although Grandma clearly misses Anna and Thomas, she finds solace in Oskar. Her joy in Oskar evokes her decision that she had to have a child for the sake of the future. If she had given into the pain of the past and continued to force the possibility of children to go away, she would have deprived the future world of Oskar and deprived herself of the wonder she feels in seeing him in the spotlight. At first glance, Foer appears to gender this form of hope because of its relationship to children and pregnancy. Indeed, in the Sixth Borough fable, the girl lives in Manhattan and the present, whereas the boy lives in the Sixth Borough and also tries to preserve the past by sealing the girl’s “I love you” in a jar. However, Grandma’s philosophy ties back to Oskar’s dad’s pronouncement that the universe is the way it is because it’d be different if it weren’t. Although Grandma’s reasoning seems esoteric, Oskar’s dad reveals that this reasoning actually has roots in physics. This connection also shows that Oskar has missed the humanity in his dad’s love of science.


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