Mourning in the Age of Terror: Revisiting Don DeLillo’s Elusive 9/11 NovelFalling Man

Abstract

This article revisits Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man—generally considered a minor work in the author’s oeuvre—in the wider contexts of the American novel after 11 September, contemporary discourses around terrorism, the “War on Terror,” and recent currents of global ethnonationalism. It is organized around an iconic photograph in modern American history, one of an anonymous man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center shortly before its collapse, as well as around DeLillo’s difficult novel named after this same photo. These works are primarily interpreted herein through Emmanuel Levinas’s analysis of images as symbolic substitutions and Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” which I use to ask critical questions about Falling Man’s expression of the societal shock represented by 9/11 and of private and public mourning in response to terrorism, as well as about what it means to be unable to mourn altogether.