Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

For my book report I read the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This book was published by Haughton Mifflin in 2005. The novel takes place mostly in New York City, shortly after terrorists destroy the Twin Towers in 2001. However, the time switches from the narrator's present to the late 1940s when his grandparents are newlyweds and even farther back to when they are teenagers in Germany. In the present time, Oskar lives in an apartment building. Across the street, in another building, is his grandmother. The two of them sometimes communicate with one another through signs in their windows and walkie-talkies. The main protagonist of the novel is a 9 year old boy named Oskar Schell. Oskar’s father, Thomas Schell, dies in the attack on the world trade center in 2001. While looking through his father's closet, Oskar finds a key inside a vase, along with a slip of paper reading "Black." Curious, Oskar sets off on a mission to contact every person in New York City with the last name Black, in alphabetical order, in order to find the lock to the key his father left behind. The novel also tells a separate narrative that eventually converges with the main story through a series of letters written by Oskar’s grandfather to Oskar’s father and by Oskar’s grandmother to Oskar himself. After almost a year of searching, Oskar is about to give up. After Oskar got vital news from one of the first blacks he met he goes and meets with a peculiar man named William Black. Oskar then gives William Black two keys, the one to the William’s father’s safe-deposit box and one for Oskar’s apartment. Oskar returns home and decides to dig up his father’s grave. He is joined in his mission by the renter, and after opening the empty coffin Oskar decides to fill it, but he is unable to decide what with. The renter suggests the letters that he wrote but was never able to send to his son, and they fill the coffin and re-bury it. Upon coming home, Oskar flips