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narrative begins by informing the reader that Jonathan is attempting to
help Alex change the way he speaks and writes English. In doing so, he
eventually succeeds in making Alex’s English sound a little less like he
was born behind the Iron Curtain. The change in Alex’s English is most
obvious in the epistolary narrative. For example, in the same letter in
which Alex assures Jonathan that he has adopted Jonathan’s suggested
alterations to the hotel scene, he also makes special note of the word
“obligated,” underlining it and adding in parentheses, “thank you,
Jonathan.” Previously, when Alex has tried to use the word “obligated,”
he has written “oblongated.” After he makes this correction, he ceases to
misspell the word both in his letters and in his novel chapters. Similarly,
in another letter, Alex writes, “I attempted to guess some of the things
you would have me alter, and I altered them myself. For example, I did
not use the word ‘spleen’ with such habituality, because I could perceive it
made you nerves by the sentence in your letter when you said, ‘Stop using
the word ‘spleen.’ It’s getting on my nerves’” (54). “Spleen” is perhaps
Alex’s most frequently (and incorrectly) used word, both in his journey
narrative and in his letters. He uses the word as a synonym for “annoy.”
After this point, he ceases using the word in his letters—a noticeable
difference, considering the frequency with which he uses it before.
There is only one example of Jonathan’s direct impact on Alex’s voice
in the journey narrative. After many letters have been exchanged, Alex
has adapted his voice to be a more accurate representation of American
English. Because each of his journey chapters are drafts that have not
yet been edited by Jonathan, any improvement in his English must be a
result of counseling from Jonathan’s letters. Apart from the omissions and
alterations Alex made, there is one sole example of Alex self-editing, which
occurs toward the end of the novel: “But I understanded understood
that the silence was necessary for him to talk” (Foer 157). Alex’s selfediting
shows that his correspondence with Jonathan is altering how he
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writes and speaks English. In a previous chapter, “A Very Rigid Search,”
Alex writes a line of dialogue in which he says, “You understanded me,
yes?” demonstrating that he did not know the correct past-tense form
of “understand” before (113). This is also the only instance in the entire
novel in which a word is crossed out, making it visibly jarring and
noticeable to the reader. Foer likely crossed out the word for two reasons:
first, to remind the reader that what we are seeing is a work in progress,
and, second, to alert the reader to the fact that as a result of Jonathan’s
tutoring, Alex has begun to better understand the rules of the English
language.
The most apparent complication of voice in Everything Is Illuminated
is that the author is a character within the book in which he is writing one
of the narratives. That the character, Jonathan, is writing only one of the
narratives is inherently problematic, as it is his name on the book’s cover.
The sections the character does write are not directly about him but are
fictional histories of his ancestors. In these sections, we only occasionally
hear snippets of Jonathan’s voice via authorial intrusion. These are mere
flashes, however, and they reveal little more than explanations of familial
relations. We first realize that Jonathan is in fact writing the fictional
Trachimbrod narratives when, at the end of the second chapter entitled
“The Lottery, 1791,” the chapter ends with a moment of authorial intrusion.
“We were to be in good hands,” Jonathan interjects, in reference
to Brod being placed in the care of Yankel D (Foer 22). At the end of
the next section of the Trachimbrod narrative, Jonathan interjects again.
“He [Yankel D] had been given a baby, and I a great-great-great-greatgreat-great-grandfather,”
he writes, thereby explaining his relationship to
Yankel D and to the baby, Brod (42). Jonathan only ever intrudes into the
narrative to explain things, such as clarifying his relationships to people
within the story or on rare occasion to make a short commentary like
“We were to be in good hands.” He does not provide any extensive com-
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