Don delillo's falling man and the heterogeneous dialectic

Abstract EN

Falling Man by Don DeLillo is taken by most critics as either a discourse on 9/11 tragic events, or a text dealing with a society in crisis, or a work on terrorism and trauma.

Though these leitmotivs are pertinent and explicit, other implicit, dialectic issues receive less attention.

Critics also do not incorporate into their analyses DeLillo's “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September.

” This article forms—in many perspectives—the background and the core from which Falling Man appears.

In both the article and the novel, DeLillo considers 9/11 an occasion upon which to fathom the global situation he finds typically unfolding in New York City where a group of Oriental terrorists assault Occidental citizens.

In this paper, I analyze both the novel and the article as textually intersectional works exhibiting a specific type of heterogeneous dialectic between characters of two camps: the Western represented by American figures and their world, and the Eastern represented by the terrorists and their world.

“Reflections” and Falling Man probe and explore ongoing ideological debates that preoccupy these camps; but the article is narrower and personal, whereas the novel is more universal and impersonal.

Contriving heterogeneous dialectic per se, the novelist scrutinizes each body's conditions and voices his comments and reflections about them.

He tackles them neither through an Orientalist approach nor an Occidentalist mentality.

Rather, he neutrally positions himself in the middle between the East and the West.