Readings and Thoughts on Creative Nonfiction

Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

Foer uses punctuation to describe his relationship with his father and brother. He writes of how they use different types of silence to communicate, or more often to not communicate and miscommunicate. The family has a history of suffering from heart-attacks, and the men in the family seem to become yes-men. What's interesting is that Foer makes it seem like becoming yes-men helps save their lives, but not causing stress because they do not get into arguments, but being yes-men may in fact have the opposite effect, since they never release any tension from having disagreements, this may help cause their heart problems.

Below are a few select quotes from the piece, along with some of my thoughts regarding them.

"Listen," he said, and then surrendered to a long pause, as if the pause were what I was supposed to listen to.

Foer makes it seem that his family is a silent sort of family, and that in many instances, members of the family should be able to figure out what's going on based on the silences.

I often inflict willed silences upon my mother when she asks about my relationships with girls. Perhaps this is because I never have relationships with girls-only relations. It depresses me to think that I've never had sex with anyone who really loved me.

Foer kind of seems to complain in this piece about his family's lack of communication, yet he himself contributes to this.

My younger brother uses these a lot with me, probably because he, of all the members of my family, is the one most capable of telling me what he needs to tell me without having to say it. Or, rather, he's the one whose words I'm most convinced I don't need to hear. Very often he will say, "Jonathan~" and I will say, "I know."

I think this is interesting because it shows how closely connected the two brothers are. So, in a way, silences bring them together.

My father has suffered twenty-two heart attacks-more than the rest of us combined. Once, in a moment of frankness after his nineteenth, he told me that his marriage to my mother had been successful because he had become a yes-man early on.

"We've only had one fight," he said. "It was in our first week of marriage. I realized that it's never, ever worth it."

This makes it sound like the reason the father has had so many heart-attacks is because he became a yes-man early on. Pretending that it's never, ever worth it seems to stress him out.

Hearing this felt like having an elephant sit on my chest-my brother, whom I loved more than I loved myself, was surrendering.

Perhaps Foer knew that soon he would be next in becoming a yes-man, like the rest of his family.

I , too, am becoming a yes-man, and that, like my father's and my brother's, my surrender has little to do with the people I say yes to, or with the existence of questions at all. It has to do with a fear of dying, with rehearsal and preparation.

This is interesting, especially if my theory that being a yes-man contributes to their heart disease, because it would be ironic that the reason he became a yes-man was to prevent himself from dying.

Somewhat less common is one participant's saying something whose words the other understands completely but whose meaning is not understood at all.

This is interesting, and I think a difficult concept to understand.

"It pains me to think of you alone."

"ßIt pains me to think of me without any grandchildren to love."

Reading between the lines, so to speak, takes skill, and perhaps people who are familiar with reading silences are better at this than people who are not used to silence.

A related set of marks, the "should-have brackets," signify words that were not spoken but should have been.

It's interesting because in the example Foer provides, I think if one were to actually hear this conversation, one would be able to hear the "should-have brackets."

"I::not myself~"

I like this because it uses the punctuation Foer has already explained, and it is a little heartbreaking.