Yet he is the opposite of a godlike figure of narrative authority. Though he never directly addresses the reader, he alone is there in every section. It is, literally speaking, the author-as-character who holds this all together. In the third, Alex writes letters to Jonathan, who has now returned to America, commenting on the portions of this novel that he has been receiving, and asking for advice about the writing of his own account. In the second, episodes in the lives of the Jews of Trachimbrod since the 18th century are imagined in a novel that Jonathan is writing. In one, Alex, a linguistically inept translator, describes his journey across Ukraine with an American called Jonathan Safran Foer to find the shtetl of Trachimbrod, where, half a century earlier, Jonathan's grandfather escaped a Nazi massacre. Describe the construction of Everything Is Illuminated and you risk making the novel sound like an exercise in narrative ingenuity fit only for the seminar room.
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