Everything Is Illuminated Novel Analysis

Everything Is Illuminated is a novel comprising of two elaborately intertwined narratives, written from the perspectives of Alexander Perchov and Jonathan Safran Foer. Alex is a Ukrainian translator who follows Jonathan on his quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather when the Nazis invaded his shtetl, Trachimbrod. The structure is constructed by braiding three strands of the novel together- Alex’s account of his journey with Jonathan, Jonathan’s novel in progress, and letters from Alex to Jonathan commenting on the portions of the novel he has been receiving. This is a post modernistic novel as it exhibits characteristics of post modernism, such as holding the belief that truth is relative, and there is no absolute truth. The author

In the words of Wendy B. Faris, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Texas, magical realism is described to be used in conjunction with “a preponderance of realistic event, character, and description that conform to the conventions of literary realism.” Novels that incorporate magical realism differ from those that fall under the genre of fantasy as it is set in a normal world with realistic descriptions of humans and society. Another characteristic of magical realism being used in novels is that it often involves two conflicting perspectives, one based on an alleged rational view of reality, and the other based on the acceptance of supernatural as the norm. More often than not, the narrator’s tone towards these supernatural elements indicates that they are normal. The seamless fusion of real and fantastic is possible because the presence of supernatural is integrated with the perceptions of characters in the novel. As Angel Flores, a 20th century Puerto Rican writer, puts it, magical realism transforms “the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal”. Readers are also forced to accept magical realism through authorial reticence, which occurs when characters in the novel express a lack of clear opinions of bout the accuracy of events and credibility of world views. This prevents the supernatural world from being questioned since making the supernatural elements explicit would eradicate a person’s position of neutrality regarding his conventional view of reality. The narrative technique of metafiction is defined by Professor Patricia Waugh, a literary critic, intellectual historian and Professor of English Literature, to be “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and