Non-Communication::Family Disease

“A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” - Johnathan Safran Foer

This deeply detached, yet highly emotional short story illustrates, quite literally, the origins of heart disease for a Jewish-American family scarred by personal history. The genius of the piece is associating something that is normally dissected through scientific and medical knowledge, and puts it through the sieve of human emotion. Foer then takes this intense and unforgettable emotion and strains it back through that impersonal and categorical filter of pictographs and definition, thus making it all the more emotionally intricate. The author makes use of literal symbols to create literary symbolism. Foer knows all too well that trying to explain the actions and emotions of his daily life would not only be fruitless and ineffective, but contradictory as well. By using shapes, he allows his audience to envision a situation that they can better relate to, instead of telling the reader what to see. The application of graphics instead of commonly used words and phrases, also mirrors the communication barriers that he tries to describe. Ultimately in the end we see a combination of undefined and unrecognizable symbols that more aptly and beautifully portrays their tragic circumstances than any word ever could. The myriad hieroglyphics and unspoken words, represent unresolved chaos that piles up in each member's heart, eventually manifesting itself in physical infirmity. The emotional pressures of historical horrors and ongoing disappointments of this family are so desperately piercing as to have disabled them from living fully. The narrator describes the thought of compromise and “the 'corroboration mark'” as suffocatingly depressing, as he ponders his own fate. He knows that the “yes-man” mentality will follow him forever because the alternative is death, or near death, due to the contingency of a heart attack; and so he is doomed to a mediocre, sorrowful, unquestioning, and unfulfilled life. This emotion stagnancy is the foundation of his heart disease, a disease that has become the basis of his family relations and his overall existence in a “↓↓↓↓↓... ∞.”