1st Meeting

In our first meeting we discussed the first few of pages of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The first thing we discussed was our reading schedule. We are reading around 80 pages a night. Sara then read the excerpt to us aloud. We determined that the narrator is most likely a child around the age of 10. He or she has very random trains of thought and uses the word "and" excessively which turns his sentences into run-ons. He or she is also very repetitive. For instance in the paragraph about the child's jujitsu class he says that he class was three and a half months ago at least 4 times. He also adds in a few french sayings in his writing. With this we found that he tends to assume his superiority over others by thinking he is smarter and needs to explain things to everybody else. He tells us what the french sayings mean and he tells his jujitsu class what pacifist means because he assumes nobody else knows. He starts off the story with just a stream on consciousness, jumping from one thought to the next. In his thoughts about hearing everybody else's heartbeat Sara and Mary brought up the fact that peoples' heart rates get faster when they lie or are nervous. We deduced from this that if we could hear everybody's heart beat then we could potentially read their emotions and it could change the entire perspective of the conversation. He goes into story-telling later in the excerpt when talking about his jujitsu class. All in all we get an impression of a slightly off child telling a story.