On pages 73 and 74, the novel begins to seem very similar to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The passage begins to take on the tone of the grandpa. The narrarator talks in ways very similar to the way Grandpa wrote his letters to his son. The author says “I typed in your address. Nothing. I swt one of the search engines to find you. Nothing.” The resemblance this has to Oskar’s grandpas narratives is very suprising. When first assigned this, I thought we would not be able to find any similarities at all. However the tone this passage seems to take on, and the way the author writes does seem to be very alike. They even both write about nothing alot. Grandpa always writes about the Nothing Places inthe house, and the author here tells of how they searched so hard for nothing, kind of like how the grandpa searches so hard to find Anna in Grandma, yet there is nothing. They also both share in common a virtual world. Although the authors image of a virtual world is more in the literal sense in this passage, Oskar’s grandpa constantly tries to a virtual world in the airport. The similarites these two passages have is very interesting, and I could continue to go on and on about the many similarities.
I think you make a very good connection. When I was reading this part of the story it also clicked to me that it was similar to grandma in ELIC. Do you think that the nothing in this story is actually meant to be “something” just like in ELIC. Perhaps the nothing in this story is really the something, or the some reason for why there was a search in the first place. I could be completely off and maybe that doesn’t make sense but it seemed possible when i first thought about it!