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.
Themes
A Different World
Falling Man illustrates the significant way the September 11 attacks changed the lives of the characters. Characters such as Keith and Lianne are only portrayed in the aftermath of the attacks, but the novel hints at their lives before the attacks. After becoming estranged from his wife, Keith played his weekly poker game and dedicated everything to his career. Lianne raised Justin primarily by herself and endured her mother’s criticisms of Keith without having the ability to respond. After the attacks, however, this dissatisfaction and unhappiness are distant memories. The novel’s structure reflects how the attacks sever the characters from the discontent of their past and thrust them relentlessly into a new and different world. After September 11, the characters cannot relate to their former selves, and, like the reader, they only view their past miseries through the lens of their current unhappiness. The world so much after the attacks that the past seems a distant and unreachable place, somewhere the characters can only recollect fleetingly even though they are only removed from the memories by days, weeks, or months.
The world itself is changed by the attacks. The physical absence of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center is a frequent motif in the story, as characters look at the New York City skyline and expect to see the familiar shapes, but they are reminded instead of the sudden absence. This physical emptiness echoes the emotional emptiness of the characters’ lives, as the negative space on the skyline reminds them of everything they have lost in the aftermath of the attacks. Instead, they see the towers in other places. Lianne and Martin glimpse the towers in a painting made years before the attacks; the simple geometric pattern is enough to remind them of what is missing. All that remains of the towers is a pile of rubble and a vast amount of emotional trauma. Like the distant, foreign countries that Martin lists as holiday destinations, the United States now has its own ruins. The characters must be content with a different world, one in which America—like every other country—can endure the pain and suffering of such a devastating attack. The physical absence of the towers is a constant reminder of the imperial decline that the characters feel deep within themselves, illustrating that American exceptionalism can no longer be taken for granted.
For all the characters’ insistence that the world has changed, there are hints that the attacks are simply the latest iteration in a cycle of violence repeated throughout history. Martin provides a historical, European perspective as a former member of a terrorist-associated group. In contrast, Hammad provides a Middle Eastern perspective on the attacks, which references the imperialism and destruction of Western powers in his homeland as a justification for the attacks, as he and Amir believe that their actions are part of an ongoing war. The structure of the novel endorses this perspective. The final chapter charts Hammad’s last moments before switching the focus to Keith and returning to the minutes immediately after the attack as he wanders the streets of New York. The novel is a cycle, beginning and ending with the same violence and pain. The world may be different after the attacks, but the changing nature of the world after a burst of violence is part of a broader and familiar cycle that should be expected.
The Loss of Identity
The traumatic experiences endured by the characters force them to reconsider drastically how they perceive themselves. Before the terrorist attack, Keith based his entire identity on his career. He was a lawyer who worked in the World Trade Center, and he used the location to indicate his professional success. He even left his wife and child to move into an apartment closer to the World Trade Center to validate this identity. After the attacks, however, he cannot continue to identify in this manner. There are no towers for him to use as the basis for his identity. Instead, there is only a pile of smoldering rubble where the towers used to be. Keith’s identity is a similarly smoldering ruin and, as he walks through the dusty, chaotic streets, he feels anonymous and alone. He returns to Lianne’s apartment without thinking, seeking a new physical place that can become the foundation of his identity. He stops working as a lawyer and living near the World Trade Center. Eventually, he barely lives in New York City and becomes a professional poker player. When Keith loses the towers, he loses his identity. This radical, traumatic rupture causes a psychological breakdown that eventually drives him further from New York as he seeks to redefine himself.
Lianne suffers a similar loss of identity after the attacks. She welcomes Keith back into her life, but she struggles with the sudden fragility of existence. As with her work in the Alzheimer’s therapy group, she is worried that her life is of no consequence and lacks any form of permanence. If everything can change in a second, she reasons, then what legacy will she leave, and how will people remember her? The Falling Man performance makes Lianne anxious, in part because he is anonymous. He reminds her of the anonymous fatalism of existence. Lianne turns to religion to cope with her loss of identity. She does not identify as religious, nor does she believe in God, but attending church allows her to repeat the rituals and gestures she identifies with her father. She believes that she is continuing his legacy and allowing his identity to live vicariously in the empty space of her own hollow identity. By continuing her father’s memory, Lianne invests her existence with a sense of permanence borrowed from the past. She feels like she is part of a historical chain of events rather than a desperate, anonymous person succumbing to the same fate as everyone else.
While his parents struggle with their identities, Justin conducts a similar struggle. As a young boy, he does not have the same fixed, formative identity as his parents, nor does he understand enough about the attacks to be discombobulated entirely by them. Instead, his struggles with identity revolve around the need to identify a culprit for the trauma he views in the world around him. Justin and his friends take the information they have and decide to blame a man named Bill Lawton, an interpolation of the name Osama bin Laden. By creating a (misinformed) identity for the mastermind behind the attack, Justin and his friends feel that they better understand what is happening. In this case, they create an identity to alleviate anxiety they do not quite understand. Justin’s actions echo his parents’ anxiety, although they view his references to Bill Lawton as naïve and misinformed. Their patronizing view of Justin’s desire to identify a person responsible ignores that they feel the same urges and the same anxieties. The parents’ reactions to Justin’s struggles with identity illustrate that neither Keith nor Lianne truly understands that their responses to the attacks are not dissimilar to Justin’s. Instead, all three try to create, repair, and restore questions of identity.
The Need for Control
The September 11 attacks are unexpected and devastating. One of the most traumatic revelations for the characters is how little control they have over their lives. For all their professional success and supposed safety, the characters can do nothing if a group of people decides to fly airplanes into buildings. Their safety and their control were an illusion. In response, the characters seek out systems and routines that offer them alternative ways to feel they are in control of their lives. The clearest example of this is Keith, who turns to poker to pretend that he has agency. Card games operate with an established set of rules and parameters. Keith knows which cards are in the deck, though not the order they will be drawn. He knows the meaning of certain hands and the jargon and language used to play poker. Keith is relatively good at poker but not the best in the world. He likes poker because it offers him the semblance of control: nothing can happen outside of the established rules, which Keith knows and appreciates. The routines, rituals, and systems of the poker game provide a substitute for the feeling of control and agency that Keith feels is absent from his life after the September 11 attacks.
Lianne’s response to her perceived lack of control is to return to her work. She is a freelance book editor, and performing this role allows her to feel the same sense of agency as Keith feels at the poker table. The English language has rules and conventions that Lianne knows intimately, like the card game. She edits a book to ensure that it conforms to expectations and rules, imposing a system of control on the language. When Lianne learns about a book that focuses on the September 11 attacks, she feels desperate to take on the job. She wants to use her editing skills to control the event that changed her life. She may not be able to change what happened on September 11, and she will never be able to control the actions of others, but editing this book would provide her with the sense that she is somehow exercising agency over the events. She can force the words describing the attacks to adhere to her preconceived sense of the world. By editing books like this, Lianne exercises her desire for control in a world that actively rejects her capacity for agency.
Nina takes an alternative approach to feeling that she lacks control. Rather than seek out new control systems, she abandons the idea that she has any agency over her life. When Lianne quizzes her about Martin’s past, for example, she rejects any responsibility for sharing or even knowing that he might have taken part in controversial actions. Similarly, she abandons herself to cigarettes and painkillers, embracing a physiological nihilism that suggests that she does not care or control what happens to her health. Later, she gives away her art and dies during a period not covered in the narrative. Nina fades from view in the aftermath of the attacks, increasingly abandoning herself to the ebb and flow of time rather than trying to impose any degree of control over her existence. Like the other characters, Nina recognizes that she has lost control in the wake of the attacks. However, unlike the other characters, she responds by embracing this loss of control rather than seeking out an artificial substitute.
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By Don DeLillo
