Introduction It often happens that the manner of the author’s narrative determines the overall success of this or that work. The way the author chooses to reveal his or her message either captures the reader’s attention at once or makes the book disgusting for a reader. I believe that the narrative style of the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer called Everything Is Illuminated is one of the main factors that determine the never ending interest of the readers towards the book. Discuss The novel under consideration is the first novel of the American author, published in 2002. The trip that Foer took to Ukraine and Prague to search for his ancestral shtetl and for the heroic woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis served as a springboard for the novel (Anderson 69). Actually, the author confesses: “I still really don’t know why I went…I never wrestled with ‘Where did I come from?’ I guess it must have had to do with where I was in life – thinking seriously about what I wanted to do, and about writing. In a way, the trip became a trip about finding out why I was making the trip in the first place.” (Anderson 69) The author’s experiences during his trip to Ukraine and Prague inspired him to resort to some original way of presentation of his story. The book, therefore, acquires a particular manner in which the writing switches between two story arcs. Namely, these are an imagined history of the shtetl from the eighteenth century to the twentieth (“a fanciful vision that owes a little to Fellini and a lot to Rushdie” (Foer, 2002 141), and the contemporary straightforward story of a search for Trachimbrod (that is very much like the author’s own) as told by a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer. The author has been criticized for naming his character after himself. Some critics consider it to be self-indulgent and precious even. But the thing is that Philip Roth, the writer Foer is often compared to did the same in four of his books: The Facts , Deception , Patrimony , and Operation Shylock. The narration from several points of view is also a peculiar feature for Foer’ second novel titled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Here the main narrator is an idealistic and naïve child Oskar, but the author also creates two other narrators in a parallel story. These are Oscar’s paternal grandparents who are even vaguer in their narratives. The stories of their childhood are often revealed through the letters they have written, some of them are addressed to Oscar and others to Oscar’s father. Therefore, in both works the letters serve as a tool which helps the author to tell his story. In his trip to Ukraine Jonathan is accompanied by the Ukrainian native Alexander, or, Alex, Perchov, Alex’s grandfather and his dog. Alexander appears to be very fond of American culture and “a connoisseur” of the English language, he works as a translator. Both stories are tied together by the letters that Alex sends to Foer. The letters are written in the kind of broken Russo-English. Anderson claims that it must be Prague that filtered the lexicon that Foer’s character has: “Sit down in any restaurant, and you’ll find English-language menus strewn with Alex-isms: “fine poultry soup abounding with vitamins.” (Anderson 69) Alex’s narrative becomes a peculiar feature of the book; his broken Eng