46 pages • 1 hour read
Don DeLilloFalling Man
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapter 4-“On Marienstrasse”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Shortly after their separation, Keith and Lianne found different activities to occupy their time. Keith hosted weekly six-man poker games in his apartment while Lianne organized fiction-based therapy sessions for people with early diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease. While the attack on the towers ends Keith’s poker games, Lianne continues to attend the therapy sessions, and they take on a new “measure of intensity” (21). Lianne hosts a short conversation at each session and then gives the attendees a writing prompt. They write for 20 minutes and then share their stories. Though the stories varied before, the attendees now want to “write about the planes” (22).
Keith returns to Lianne’s apartment with his mail. Lianne meets her mother at Grand Central Station and is surprised by the heavy police presence. She sees a crowd gathered around a street artist; the man is dangling from the side of a building, dressed in a suit, and posing his body to replicate a famous photograph of a man who committed suicide by jumping from a high floor in the World Trade Center rather than dying inside during the September 11 attacks. This performance artist has become famous around New York and is named Falling Man. Lianne returns to her mother and helps her carry her bags back to her apartment.
Sleeping in the same bed as Keith, Lianne notices the lack of sexual tension or expectation between them. All she senses is “a broad pause in recognition of a thousand sour days and nights” (24) and decides that they both require contact from another person. Keith remembers the briefcase he absentmindedly picked up while exiting the World Trade Center during the attack. The briefcase does not belong to him. Opening it, he inspects the uninteresting contents. Isabel and Lianne discuss their children’s strange behavior. As well as whispering secretively about a man named Bill Lawton, Justin and Isabel’s twins now seem obsessed with a pair of binoculars. Lianne asks Justin about Bill Lawton and the binoculars, but he is hesitant to reply. Keith performs physical exercises to help with his recovery, but they do not help with the psychological effects of the attack.
Lianne thinks about her father, who committed suicide rather than live with dementia. Nina’s lover Martin returns to New York from Europe, where he works as an art dealer. Lianne is concerned about her mother’s sex life and her recent knee replacement, but Martin assures her that Nina is fine; he plans to take her to Connecticut for two weeks. Martin, a German who speaks excellent English, asks about Keith, and Lianne explains their strange but “innocent” (30) sleeping arrangement. Lianne, Martin, and Nina discuss the terrorists and their motivations. Martins notes that, to the terrorists, they “are targets now” (31). Martin stares at a painting in the kitchen and sees the towers. Lianne sees them too.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Keith locates the owner of the briefcase. On his way to return the briefcase to its owner, he begins to have doubts but arrives at the apartment anyway. The briefcase belongs to a woman named Florence Givens. She welcomes Keith into her home and insists on telling him about her experiences on the day of the attack. Several of her memories overlap with Keith’s recollections, and he recognizes her sudden and desperate need to share her story.
Nina warned Lianne against marrying Keith, but Lianne married him anyway. Now, Keith is a “hovering presence” (37) in her life. He takes care of Justin while Lianne deals with the notes from her group therapy sessions. A doctor working on the project warns her not to get overinvested and ensure that the writing assignments remain for the participants rather than herself. During the writing sessions, the participants write about the planes. As they explore their feelings, Lianne realizes that the doctor is right and that she needs these people. She sees them as “the living breath of the thing that killed her father” (39). As they talk over one another, Lianne notices that none talks about the 19 terrorists.
Keith notices a newfound strangeness and unfamiliarity to previously routine actions and chores. Walking, eating, and speaking seem different during his “spells of reflection” (41). Lianne reads everything she can about the attacks and searches for signs and meaning in everything that happens. She often hears music from an apartment in her building and decides that it sounds Middle Eastern. The music angers her, and she thinks about “knocking on the door and saying something” (42) to the girl named Elena who lives in the apartment. Lianne becomes obsessive, and she thinks about how she can confront Elena without being offensive. She lays awake in bed after having sex with Keith, unable to sleep while thinking about the music.
After Lianne returns from a jog, Keith talks to her about Justin. With his friends, Justin uses binoculars to search the sky for planes. His friend Katie claims to have seen the plane that hit the tower, so now, “they’re looking for more planes” (45). Justin also claims the planes hit the towers but that the towers did not collapse, even though he has been corrected. Keith reveals that Bill Lawton refers to the children’s mishearing of Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist leader whose al-Qaeda group orchestrated the September 11 attacks. The children have created “the myth of Bill Lawton” (46) to explain what is happening in the world. As they sit together, Lianne and Keith talk about his plans. He hopes they are ready to sink into their “little lives” (47).
Part 1, “On Marienstrasse” Summary
In Hamburg, Germany, an older Iraqi man and a young man named Hammad escape the rain in the entranceway of a mosque after evening prayers. The older man remembers fighting child soldiers during the Iraq-Iran war. Hammad listens politely. Many men in Hammad’s community grow beards and talk about corruption in the Western countries; they extol their Islamic faith and criticize Jewish people for all their problems. The discussions are led by an Egyptian man named Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, though Hammad is unsure whether Amir’s comments are “funny, true or stupid” (48). Hammad is not as religious or devout as men like Amir are, and he knows that people who pass through his mosque are “dangerous to the state” (49). Hammad knows men who research American flight schools in internet cafes. He knows that Amir looks down on him for having a girlfriend and overeating. Hammad prays with Amir and his friends more, feeling that he is becoming “inseparable from jihad” (50) alongside his brothers. He tells his girlfriend that he is going away for a while.
Part 1, Chapter 4-“On Marienstrasse” Analysis
As the characters try to navigate their lives after such a devastating event, they begin to rely on rituals and gestures to cling to a sense of normality. Keith collects his mail from his old apartment and begins the process of altering the occasional misspellings of his name. He used to do this every week, but the act has lost meaning after the attacks. He still changes the names on the envelope, but he no longer recognizes the version of Keith to whom the letters were addressed. He no longer recognizes the person performing the act. The more he clings to the familiarities of the past, the more he begins to realize that he is no longer that person.
When Lianne visits her mother’s house, she discusses seeing the towers in a piece of art. The two towers at the World Trade Center were simple geometric shapes, meaning that their vague outline is repeated many times in the natural world and art. Lianne and others realize that they notice the towers in so many places because they are increasingly aware they are no longer there. The attacks have changed the New York skyline, and the steadfast, ever-present towers are now noticeable by their absence. Instead of seeing the towers in the city, the inhabitants of New York begin to see the towers everywhere else. This behavior is a subtle indication of their desire to return to the world before the attacks. They crave the familiar sight of the towers, even though they know that the towers are gone. This yearning for the familiar manifests in their sudden visions of the towers in art, nature, and the world around them. They see the towers more often because they know they are gone forever. These glimpses into a lost past are manifestations of the desire to return to a simpler, happier time.
At the end of Part 1, a new perspective is introduced to the story. Hammad’s part of the narrative takes place before the September 11 attacks and charts his journey from a rainy night in Hamburg to the cockpit of one of the planes that crashes into the World Trade Center. Hammad’s perspective is important because it suggests that the people who conducted the attack were not entirely devoted to the cause, as hinted at by the news the characters consume. Instead, Hammad is a man filled with doubts. He is fascinated by Western culture, and he chases after women, much to the scorn of his friend Amir (whose full name, Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, identifies him as one of the real terrorists who hijacked the planes on September 11). Rather than an unflinching villain, Hammad is a human being. He will destroy the lives of the other characters and be part of an attack that will change the shape of global politics, but he is more concerned with sex and schoolwork in this part of the story. The three chapters that focus on Hammad provide a humanizing perspective on a seemingly inhuman act.
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