Falling Man Book Analysis Essay

In Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man gives the perfect scenario as to how life can be taken at any moment. Life often gets taken for granted. It is something that does in fact have an expiration date. This novel portrays two characters who face the new normal of the world collapsing in every sense following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. The novel follows the paths of Keith and Lianne, as they attempt to go back to their pre-9/11 lives. These characters reunite with those long removed from their lives, as well as redo things they never would have done had 9/11 never occurred. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man reveals that in the years after the attacks on September eleventh, Keith and Lianne had a void in their lives and thrived to fill this void by going back to a nostalgic time before this tragic event.

The opening page of the novel reads “This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down... otherworldly things in the morning pall” (DeLillo, 3). Lianne faces the trauma everywhere she goes; she cannot even escape it at her job. She works with elderly dementia patients and believes that helping them write things down about their lives will help them remember the good times they experience in the past (DeLillo, 31). She soon grows worried for her son, Justin’s mental health. Lianne admits that it brings her satisfaction knowing that he is not around his father to see him covered in soot and blood as it would be too much for him to handle (DeLillo 8).

 Keith, who experiences being in the towers during the attack, suffers the most of any character. He deals with the physical pain as well as the emptiness in his life afterwards.  

In the heat of the moment, the two characters look back to years past, when the situations they were in back then seemed like nothing to worry about compared to what was happening now. Keith has friends who he plays poker with all the time. Before that, he and Lianne are still together. Although they have been separated for a while now and their marriage proves to be by no means perfect, Keith still thinks it would be a better idea to live with her than having to live the way he does now, with all the trauma he has been going through. The good times before 9/11 can be described as “golden ages”, which are “distinctly retrospective phenomena, activated by a yearning of quality lost in the transition from past to present” (Murphy 129). Looking back on golden ages in one’s life can create a deep sense of nostalgia. The months following the attacks, everyone begins to look back to these golden ages. They longed for the people, places, and things that they have not seen in years.

Those who are witnessing these events begin talking to those who have been in their lives before, such as Keith going back to Lianne after years of not being together. Lianne has a talk with her mother about whether or not it will be a good idea to let Keith back, but ultimately decides that it should happen. Lianne takes the optimistic approach, believing it will be good that her son will have a father figure in the house again (DeLillo 10). Although they never fully get back together, the two of them just being in the same room gives Keith safety, and a sense of hope. He needs a place to stay, someone to talk to, and to take care of him. He feels like she is the one for that, even though there were not any true emotions about her anymore. In a similar way, Eugene, one of Lianne’s elderly patients, admits “the phone rang. It’s my ex-wife that I haven’t talked to in like seventeen years... look what has to happen before she finally gets in her head to call” (DeLillo 63). It takes a tragic event for his wife to reunite with him. The ones who used to bring joy can be easy to go to when times get hard. 

Along with people, bringing back old habits and relive experience from years past can also make Keith and Lianne feel safer, as seen with Lianne starting to go to church. Her father was a Catholic, and although she does not prioritize attending mass regularly, she feels relief when thinking about what it could do for her. Religion can be a powerful source for individuals who are facing hard times as explained by Krystine Bachto, who writes “Nostalgia proneness correlated with use of adaptive coping, including... turning to religion,” (Bachto 355). It gives those struggling a sense of hope because they believe that there is someone far more powerful who constantly looks out for them, taking care of them. However, Keith takes a different approach, as he returns to playing poker with his old friends. Because of how likely of a chance, he had to have died per recent events, he takes on a mindset that everything in his life is being governed by chance, the same way one simply wins a game of poker because of chance. He wants to have a sense of control over things that cannot be controlled, and “This desire to control and order a situation over which they have little or no control stems from impersonal forces that govern their lives outside the poker game,” (Sumner 16). When someone survives a high-risk incident, it becomes easy to be shocked knowing how easily things could have ended worse. Great comfort can get taken in feeling like such a situation can be controlled and thinking that death was not as close as it seemed. Everyone has different ways of coping. It could be feeling like someone sits in the hands of someone with greater power that will take care of them, similar to Lianne, or feeling like a situation could be less risky and more controllable all along, similar to Keith. All these feelings lead back to having a sense of hope and comfort. 

Although these two try to make life better after the attacks, a great amount of despair still has its place within them. At the time, fear prevails. Lianne still struggles everyday listening to her clients talk about the planes. In the end, she knows this is a battle she will have to face in her mind.  Keith still has the memories from being in the towers. The things that are done to make people feel better only helps a little bit, but it still feels better than nothing. 

The events and experiences of those living through the attacks is something that hits closer to home for some more than others. These struggles of everyday life are stacked on top of the fear of the unknown that comes with living. The lives of Keith and Lianne are certainly complicated to begin with, but when they are complied with the trauma of the attacks it adds one more component of struggle that leads to them longing to relive the earlier times in their lives. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man displays these characters longing for the good times in their lives after suffering through hard moments. When tragic events happen, it is only natural that people want to go back to the nostalgic, golden ages from their past. 

Works Cited

Baelo-Allué, Sonia. “9/11 and the Psychic Trauma Novel: Don DeLillo’s ‘Falling Man’ / El 11 de Septiembre y La Novela de Trauma Psicológico: ‘Falling Man’, de Don DeLillo.” Atlantis, vol. 34, no. 1, AEDEAN: Asociación española de estudios anglo-americanos, 2012, pp. 63–79, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43486021.

Batcho, Krystine Irene. “Nostalgia: Retreat or Support in Difficult Times?” The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 126, no. 3, University of Illinois Press, 2013, pp. 355–67, https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.126.3.0355.

Murphy, Andrew R. “Longing, Nostalgia, and Golden Age Politics: The American Jeremiad and the Power of the Past.” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 7, no. 1, [American Political Science Association, Cambridge University Press], 2009, pp. 125–41, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40407220.

SUMNER, CHARLES. “Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Protective Shield Against Stimuli.” American Imago, vol. 71, no. 1, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 1–27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26305074.