Ethics in the Wake of the Image: The Post-9/11 Fiction of DeLillo, Auster, and Foer

Abstract

Three post-9/11 novels—Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close—provide readers with strategies for responding to the predominance of images in the memory archive of 9/11 and the War on Terror. In Falling Man, intervention comes in the form of David Janiak, a performance artist who encourages New Yorkers to refocus attention on the body. In Man in the Dark, Auster examines both the appeal and the hazards of images, showing how the lure of the media can eventually lead to disaster. In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Foer and his characters subvert public spectacle by appropriating visual and print media for private purposes. Looking at these three novels together, we can see that post-9/11 fiction challenges readers to develop an ethics that can respond to the aesthetics of an age dominated by images.