"And When this book is not winning, labels are attached to it: 'Post' this, or 'meta' that Oh gosh Where to start These are the sort of prefixes used by Those without opinions..?." (34) So utterly Eggers himself in the afterword entitled "Mistake We Knew We Were Making" on the preference of the present time, everything and everyone to pack in certain categories. He asks the reader his biography from these "meaningless stickers" to adopt and instead (ibid.): "People, Friends, Please: Trust your eyes, trust your ears, trust your kind." (Ibid.) This is an appeal to the readership of his life story, to make use of any theoretical preloads free and easy to let "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" Valley just sink in. because "everyone who reads this book Actually, or any book, will understand it." (Ibid.) In AHWOSG Dave Eggers describes the cancer death of his two parents within just 32 days. He is at this time 21 years old and now to be in the situation surrogate father to his nine year old brother Toph. As he lives in the next seven years of his life, what difficulties and absurd situations begnegen him and, not least as he tries to overcome his own grief and at the same time trying to make his brother a reasonably "normal" childhood, is the subject of Eggers Biography , He creates what only a few have succeeded before him. Clearly feel the reader the anger, the sadness, the hatred and despair of the narrator, yet cheesy AHWOSG acts at any point. At no point so is something like self-pity to light. It is the open, partly brutally honest, Experiences of a young man who has no fault in an exceptional situation, but has nevertheless retained his love of life. Although Eggers as, for example, "postmodern" kept in his afterword against categorizations, he plays in the course of the entire history of post-modern elements. At the beginning he gives the reader various advice on how he has to read the book, what chapter are crucial and which could skip it with a clear conscience. There follows a chapter on the main themes and motifs of his biography and last a tabular overview of the importance of some symbols and metaphors (Sun = Mother; Nosebleed = Decay, for example). During the story itself Eggers explained again and again why he has this event now shown as he presented it, and how he would be able to present it differently. For friends of a precise analysis, the classification of AHWOSG under the heading urges postmodern therefore is a natural. But he pulls these elements so through the mud, that it is quite fast actually clear what Eggers really wants and what he so clearly shows then also in the epilogue: he wants to convey the truth, his truth, about himself, his life and his brother , And this truth is for the reader who is willing to understand, to reach beyond Kategoresierungswut. Conclusion: Eggers is mine Jonathan Safran Foer about the new guild of young American writers, edit the age-old human themes such as grief, suffering and death on a new, compelling way: without kitsch, without constant tears flowing, without self-pity, but, despite all the hardships and injustice, with an increasingly noticeable love for life.
