Abstract

FALLING MAN AND AMERICAN MEDIA: COVERING THE 9/11 TERROR ATTACKS

Ass.Lecturer Fahmi Salem Hameed

Volume: 9 Issue: 3 2019

Abstract:

Falling Man as any other novel has been critically studied and examined from many different angles. It is obvious that the novel is taking on the terror attacks of 9/11. However, In After the Fall (2011), for Richard Gray, the novel is said to be dealing with “the condition of melancholia: that condition which Freud identified as one of emotional isolation and inertia,” (28). And that it is certainly more precise to say that the novel is confined to the melancholic condition, contributing an oral correspondent of serenity, that it is an indication rather than a conclusion. It is also investigated as revolving around the image of that man falling off from one of the towers and the impact of the attacks on American people. The novel traces the lives of Keith and Lianne who have survived the attacks, but their lives “are haunted both by the literal man who fell from the towers, and by a performance artist who—in shocking acts of aesthetic terrorism— replicates the falling man in public spaces,” (Hill 12). Situating these two images in relation to theories of trauma and spectacle, Herren argues that Don DeLillo’s Falling Man reconsiders local trauma by exploring how broader issues of perception, spectatorship, and artistic mediation shape our individual and collective responses to 9/11, (Miller 11). In This is the World Now: Trauma, PTSD and 9/11 in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2010), Laura Fussel argues that although there has not been particular attention to DeLillo’s portrayal of individual victims and PTSD in his previous works, Falling Man is not the first time DeLillo has confronted trauma in his fiction. Before writing Falling Man, she continues, DeLillo wrote two specific texts that have received particular attention byscholars investigating trauma: Libra (1988) and The Body Artist (2001). Libra, a novel about the John F. Kennedy assassination, explores the relationship between representation and historical trauma. The Body Artist, on the other hand, explores the toll that a shocking loss of a loved one has on the individual psyche, but focuses primarily on the corporeality of working through trauma,(15). Moreover, Duvall argues that Falling Man “examines the psychological trauma experienced by New Yorkers in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11,” (Duvall 9). It, Duvall asserts, “underscores DeLillo’s longstanding concern with the role of the artist in contemporary society,” (9). He reiterates what many others have said that DeLillo in his latest novel, Falling Man (2007), “examines the traumatic experience and personal restitution,” but in this instance “of one man, Keith Neudecker, a corporate lawyer working in the North Tower,” (191).

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