Jonathan Safran Foer

" I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative. I have many girls, believe me, and they all have a different name for me. One dubs me Baby, not because I am a baby, but because she attends to me. Another dubs me All Night. Do you want to know why? I have a girl who calls me Currency, because I disseminate so much currency around her."
-Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything is Illuminated where Alex, the narrator, introduces himself. We find out later on in the book that Alex is a native Ukrainian that speaks a very minimal amount of English, but Foer implies this brilliantly through Alex's butchering of the English language throughout his narration before he explicitly states it. One way he does this is by having Alex speak for the most part in the low style, operating largely in the textual arena, almost exclusively using simple sentence structures and complex ones that are not hard to understand, and nearly every single sentence follows the subject before predicate sentence structure without any deviation and minimal usage of subordination. It is in the cultural arena that we generalize this simplistic usage of syntax as belonging to someone that is learning English as a second language. Another way Foer does this is through Alex's improper usage of words such as "disseminate", "potent", "generative”, “dubs" and "currency" that have the right dictionary definition that he wants but are not the best choice of word that he could use. Alex, instead of saying spending money, says that he "disseminates" currency, which means the same thing, but sounds weird and ill-fitting when read by a native English speaker who is used to saying "spending money" instead of "disseminating currency"(another example of Foer playing around in the cultural arena and reader's expectations to create interesting deviations to create humor).

There are multiple reasons why Foer has Alex speak in a bastardized form of the English language. One obvious one is to create humor, mostly by deviating from traditional ways of speaking like when he says he is "potent and generative" instead of saying he is attractive to women (social/cultural arena). Another is to establish Alex's humorous and womanizing character; from the way Alex talks, you can just picture this slick talking stylish and young Eastern European man that barely speaks any English, and Foer does this all without a single use of imagery to describe Alex. Foer creates a very strong vignette of Alex without ever using imagery, which is very impressive; he provides the necessary descriptions for us to create our own image of Alex, which is stronger than if he were to do it for us. Foer also establishes Alex's footing to the reader as being one where Alex is having a conversation with us telling his life story by having Alex speak in the low style, which lends itself towards conversational writing.