Where Do We Go From Here?
This journey does not end up where we expect it to.
At first, it feels like Jonathan Safran Foer is the main character. His name is on the cover, after all. Alex and his Grandfather are just Jonathan's tour guides, right? We expect Jonathan to find Augustine, learn all about his grandfather, and have a fun-slash-wacky time along the way.
That … doesn't happen.
First, the woman they find isn't Augustine. In fact, Augustine is probably dead. Instead, the woman who is Not-Augustine, Lista, gives them a photo that reveals all about Alex's Grandfather'spast, not Jonathan's.
Then, Grandfather confesses to killing his best friend, Herschel. He didn't do it with his bare hands, but he told the Nazis Herschel was a Jew in order to save himself and his family, and Herschel was burned alive. Grandfather lets all this spill in a whopping paragraph that goes over five pages and has words that blendtogetherlikethis. He says "we all pointedateachother so what is it he should have done hewouldhavebeenafooltodoanythingelse" (29.86) and "he is stillguilty I am I am I am IamI?" (29.86).
The revelation is so shocking, it's no wonder Grandfather goes a little incoherent. This Faulknerian paragraph is the literary equivalent of someone staring you in the eye and revealing their biggest secret—which you'd maybe rather not hear. It's not easy to tell, and it's not easy to hear (or read) either.
After that, Grandfather cries a lot and kills himself. Jonathan and Alex stop writing to each other (and we're not 100% sure why), and Alex gets up the guts to kick his own abusive father out of the house in order to create a better life for his younger brother. That is not at all where we figured we'd end up, and we have to wonder, just what exactly was illuminated during this trip?