Don DeLillo and 9/11 America

In a nutshell

Don DeLillo is a postmodern American author whose most emblematic work is Falling Man, a novel that deals with the events of the Twin Towers on September 11th.

The Author's Life

Born in 1936 in New York under the wing of an Italian immigrant family, Don DeLillo attended Fordham University and later worked in the advertisement industry. His first novel, Americana (1971) depicts the issues of the media and television culture through the eyes of a television executive who travels America for a film project. A year later, DeLillo published End Zone, followed by Great Jones Street (1973). In the 1980s, Don DeLillo moved to Greece for a few years and then returned to the States and wrote several remarkable works such as White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1998). In 2007, DeLillo published one of his most emblematic works, Falling Man, a novel that deals with the event of the Twin Towers on September 11th.

Main Topics

Don DeLillo wrote about themes such as death, consumerism, immigration, and waste. However, his most emblematic writing theme is rendered in the novel Falling Man, which develops the psychological damage occasioned by mourning.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE

In Falling Man, DeLillo portrays the suffering and psychological damage beyond grief. The characters deal with the traumatic event by changing their lives to avoid it, they attempt to move on and suppress the past. On the other hand, topics like religion, death, terrorism, and the meaning of life are treated but never solved. DeLillo even includes the hijackers with a reason for doing what they felt was right. The effects of 9/11 in Falling Man are not political but existential.

Falling Man

Falling Man is a novel written by Don DeLillo and published in 2007. It is based on the unfortunate events that occurred on September 11th with the Twin Towers in New York City.

THE PLOT

The setting of the novel is New York on September 11th, 2001, the World Trade Center is collapsing and the lawyer Keith Neudecker, who works in the North Tower, walks into the flat of his estranged wife and his son Justin. He feels disoriented, he is covered in blood and with him the falling man, a performance artist that appears after the weeks of 9/11 around the city dressed up as a businessman, leaping from high places to be then caught by a safety harness and suspended in the air in the posture of someone falling from the WTC.

Keith is taken to the hospital by his wife and they get back together, however, many psychological scars and new wounds opening, and they live with the fear that the world, like the towers, may someday crash down. At the end of the narrative, the protagonist leaves his relationship to explore the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, Hammad, a member of a terrorists group that has his doubts. DeLillo does not depict terrorist as villains, instead, he portrays the perception of 9/11 from the other side.

THE STRUCTURE

Falling Man does not follow a linear plot, instead, it is cyclic, and the reader moves around until the starting point: the falling of the Twin Towers. The impact of 9/11 gives in result the interruption of relationships, fragmentation of language, distorted vision, and the city becoming a frozen zone.

The following text is an extract from Falling Man (2007):

Paper was flying down the hallway, rattling in a wind that seemed to wash down from above.

There were dead, faintly seen, in offices to either side.

He climbed out over a fallen wall and made his way slowly toward the voices.

In the stairwell, in near dark, a woman carried a small tricycle tight to her chest, a thing for a three-year-old, handlebars framing her ribs.

They walked down, thousands, and he was in there with them. He walked in a long sleep, one step and then the next.

(DeLillo D.)

This passage belongs to the last pages of the novel, it describes the tower where Keith Neudecker works being struck by one of the planes.