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the text. As Propst notes, by including “Alex’s installments of his story
punctuated by Alex’s letters (and, in the end, Grandfather’s letter as well),
the fictional Jonathan presents Alex and his grandfather as coauthors of
his memorial book. By doing so, he implicitly declares the two men to be
his landsmen, or neighbors; he asserts that they share a collective history”
(Propst 46). Propst is not the only critic to point out that the characters
of Everything Is Illuminated share a “collective history.” Others, such as
Behlman and Collado-Rodriguez, also acknowledge the importance in
the employment of multiple narrative voices to create a story that forms
a collective experience. None of them, however, have attempted to examine
how exactly the narrator-character voices of Jonathan and Alex
work together and affect one another to arrive at this notion of a collected
experience. Foer’s narratives are knit together with the precision of
a very fine needle, so that the complexity of the narrative structure of his
novel and the voices within it are not readily apparent except with close
examination. Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” provides a lens
under which to examine the function of these voices. He theorizes that
to discover the meaning of a novel, one must understand how the “languages,”
the multiple voices of heteroglossia, work together within that
novel’s narrative structures (Bakhtin 1078). In applying this strategy to a
study of Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, we see that Foer’s narrative structures
allow for a unique complication of voices that ultimately lends to
the novel’s greater meaning. Although Jonathan is meant to be the fictive
author of the novel, his voice is almost entirely regulated by Alex’s narration.
Alex’s voice, on the other hand, is affected by Jonathan’s opinions
and tutoring. In dialogue, their voices mingle together in such a way that
they at times seem almost indistinguishable. By affecting each other in
this way, each of their voices becomes inextricable from the other. Their
stories become each other’s stories, forming a greater collective experience
in which Alex and Jonathan’s relationship at work in the novel can best be
summed up as, “I am you and you are me.”
38 | Mehlinger
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Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. Second ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2010. 1076-106. Print.
Behlman, Lee. “The Escapist: Fantasy, Folklore, and the Pleasures of the Comic Book in
Recent Jewish American Holocaust Fiction.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Jewish Studies 22.3 (2004): 56-71. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 May
2011.
Collado-Rodriguez, Francisco. “Ethics in the Second Degree: Trauma and Dual Narratives
in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.” Journal of Modern Literature
32.1 (2008): 54-68. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 May 2011.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.
Print.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. “Jonathan Safran Foer on Everything Is Illuminated.” HarperCollinsPublishers.
Web.
Mindra, Mihai. “Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Holocaust Literature
within the American Context.” Studies in Jewish American Literature 28
(2009): 46-54. Project Muse. Web. 29 Apr. 2011.
Propst, Lisa. “”Making One Story”? Forms of Reconciliation in Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Everything Is Illuminated and Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases.”
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 36.1 (2011): 37-60. Project Muse. Web.
2 May 2011.
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