The Bereaved Post-9/11 Orphan Boy: Representing (and Relativizing) Crisis and Healing, Tradition and Innovation

The sorrowing child is a central figure in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007). These best-selling and award-winning novels – both of which break traditional frames of the novelistic genre through their use of visual material – feature a bereaved boy whose personal quest is to re-connect with his dead father. Nine-year-old Oskar Schell in Foer’s novel has recently lost his father in the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, which makes him a “Twin Tower orphan” even though his mother is still alive. In Selznick’s novel, Hugo Cabret’s father has died in a fire in a museum, which has made Hugo fatherless as well as motherless. The setting is Paris in the 1930s, but I will argue that The Invention of Hugo Cabret has much in common with Foer’s novel and that it may fruitfully be read as a post-9/11 narrative. Although these two novels are formally innovative, the function of the orphan harks back to earlier uses of this figure in, for instance, nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fiction where the fictional orphan’s cultural work is nothing less than to heal the adult world. Despite their traditional use of the orphan, however, I will suggest that both of these novels have the potential to raise public awareness about pre-9/11 wars and crises outside the boundaries of the USA, thus providing a more nuanced perspective on the national crisis and the War on Terror triggered by the Twin Tower attack in September 2001.