An unfortunate part of the human experience is trauma. It is unavoidable, inherently common, and completely complicated. As with many things in life, many people turn to literature in hopes of finding a magic remedy for a traumatic event, a step-by-step process for how they should react, or, at the very least, a character that makes them feel less alone. There are many misleading and useless books, but there are some in the most unlikely places that offer the most solid sympathy and the best company. One such novel is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. The novel has a recognizable depiction of the chaos and destruction surrounding traumatic events, which is enhanced by the novel's use of historical truth, within three main characters who represent three very different stages of grief. It is important to examine how Foer is able to accurately depict the trauma in his story, Extremely Strong and Incredibly Close. Todd Atchinson states, "Trauma literature describes a survivor's personal struggle in responding to and representing mass atrocities suffered through threats of individual, cultural, and inhumane eradication." Exploring this concept, he argues that trauma literature such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close attempts to follow a person's journey to redefine themselves after facing a tragedy that threatened their individual and cultural identity. The hardest part is creating text that is realistic and relatable, with a narrator you can trust to convey important information accurately throughout the story. Now, if a reader tried to think of a trustworthy narrator, Oskar might not immediately come to mind. However, it appears that Fo... halfway down the page... has recovered. “… Foer refuses to deodorize 9/11 with a simplistic framework of collective identity redemption; instead it constructs a complicated and post-traumatic picture, underlining the partial inaccessibility of the traumatic experiences of three characters – Oskar, the paternal grandfather and the grandmother – and the failure of the referential language for historical reconstruction in order to problematize the narratives of redemption and put critically questioning the political and political context. ethical dimensions of processing the trauma of September 11th” (Mendel). The use of three narrators reinforces the message that the novel tries to send: trauma affects everyone differently and recurs at different stages of life. It also provides three different perspectives to show the political and cultural effects of trauma and how people actually plan for or cope with those effects..