A Study of Falling Man in The Light of Postmodernism PDF

‫‪Allameh Tabataba’i University‬‬
‫‪Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages‬‬

‫‪Department of English Language and Literature‬‬
‫‪A Study of Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Falling Man‬‬

‫‪in Light of Postmodernism‬‬
‫‪A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements‬‬

‫‪for the Degree of Master of Arts (M.A.) in‬‬
‫‪English Literature‬‬
‫‪Advisor: Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi‬‬
‫‪Reader: Dr. Kamran Ahmadgoli‬‬
‫‪By: Somayeh Salehi‬‬
‫‪Tehran, Iran‬‬
‫‪February, 3122‬‬
‫دسترسی به این مدرک بر پایة آییننامة ثبت و اشاعة پیشنهادهها‪ ،‬پایاننامهها‪ ،‬و رسالههای تحصیل ت تکمیلی و صیانت از حقوق پدیدآوران در آنها ) وزار ت علوم‪ ،‬تحقیقا ت‪ ،‬فناوری به شمارة ‪/195929‬و تاریخ ‪ (1395/9/6‬از پایگاه اطلعا ت علمی ایران )گنج( در پژوهشگاه علوم و فننناوری‬
‫اطلعا ت ایران )ایرانداک( فراهم شده و استفاده از آن با رعایت کامل حقوق پدیدآوران و تنها برای هدفهای علمی‪ ،‬آموزشی‪ ،‬و پژوهشی و بر پایة قانون حمایت از مؤلفان‪ ،‬مصنفان‪ ،‬و هنرمندان )‪ (1348‬و الحاقا ت و اصلحا ت بعدی آن و سایر قوانین و مقررا ت مربوط شدنی است‪.‬‬
‫‪In the Name of God‬‬
‫‪The Most Merciful,‬‬
‫‪The Most Beneficent‬‬
‫‪Allameh Tabataba’i University‬‬
‫‪Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages‬‬
‫‪Department of English Language and Literature‬‬
‫‪A Study of Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Falling Man‬‬

‫‪in Light of Postmodernism‬‬
‫‪A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements‬‬

‫‪for the Degree of Master of Arts (M.A.) in‬‬
‫‪English Literature‬‬
‫‪Advisor: Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi‬‬
‫‪Reader: Dr. Kamran Ahmadgoli‬‬
‫‪By: Somayeh Salehi‬‬
‫‪February, 3122‬‬
Allameh Tabataba’i University
Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages
Department of English Language and Literature
We Hereby Recommend That the Thesis by
Somayeh Salehi
Entitled:
A Study of Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Falling Man

in Light of Postmodernism
Be Accepted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts in English Literature
Committee on Final Examination
………………… Advisor: Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi
………………… Reader: Dr. Kamran Ahmadgoli
………………… Examiner: Dr. Behzad Ghaderi
………………… Head of the Department: Dr. Zia Tajeddin
‫( از پایگاه اطلعا ت علمی ایران )گنج( در پژوهشگاه علوم و فننناوری‬1395/9/6 ‫و تاریخ‬/195929 ‫ فناوری به شمارة‬،‫ تحقیقا ت‬،‫ و رسالههای تحصیل ت تکمیلی و صیانت از حقوق پدیدآوران در آنها ) وزار ت علوم‬،‫ پایاننامهها‬،‫دسترسی به این مدرک بر پایة آییننامة ثبت و اشاعة پیشنهادهها‬
.‫( و الحاقا ت و اصلحا ت بعدی آن و سایر قوانین و مقررا ت مربوط شدنی است‬1348) ‫ و هنرمندان‬،‫ مصنفان‬،‫ و پژوهشی و بر پایة قانون حمایت از مؤلفان‬،‫ آموزشی‬،‫اطلعا ت ایران )ایرانداک( فراهم شده و استفاده از آن با رعایت کامل حقوق پدیدآوران و تنها برای هدفهای علمی‬
‫فرم گردآوری اطالعات پایاى ناهه ها‬
‫کتابخانه هرکسی دانشگاه عالهه طباطبائی‬
‫عنواى‪ :‬خَاًشی تر دٍ رهاى از داى دلیلَ‪ :‬هائَی دٍم ٍ هردی در حال ّثَط از ًگاُ پست هذرى‬
‫نویسنذه‪ /‬هحقق‪ :‬سویِ صالحی‬
‫هترجن‪:‬‬
‫استاد هشاور ‪ :‬دوتر واهراى احوذ گلی‬ ‫استاد راهنوا‪ :‬دوتر سیذ هحوذ هرًذی‬
‫واشه ناهه‪ً :‬ذارد‬ ‫کتابناهه‪ :‬دارد‬
‫وارتردی ‪‬‬ ‫تَسؼِ ای ‪‬‬ ‫تٌیادی ‪‬‬ ‫نوع پایاى ناهه‪:‬‬
‫سال تحصیلی‪9831 :‬‬ ‫هقطع تحصیلی‪ :‬وارشٌاسی ارشذ‬
‫دانشکذه‪ :‬ادتیات فارسی ٍ‬ ‫نام دانشگاه‪ :‬ػالهِ عثاعثائی‬ ‫هحل تحصیل‪ :‬تْراى‬
‫زتاًْای خارجی‬
‫گروه آهوزشی‪ :‬زتاى ٍ ادتیات اًگلیسی‬ ‫تعذاد صفحات‪ 19 :‬صفحِ‬
‫کلیذ واشه ها به فارسی‪:‬‬
‫‪ -8‬هٌغمِ صفر‬ ‫‪ -9‬آخرالسهاى‬
‫‪ -4‬پست هذرًیتِ‬ ‫‪ -2‬هٌغك هثْن‬
‫کلیذ واشه ها به انگلیسی‪:‬‬
‫‪9- Apocalypse‬‬ ‫‪8- Ground Zero‬‬
‫‪2- Fuzzy Logic‬‬ ‫‪4- Postmodernism‬‬
‫چکیذه‬
‫الف‪ .‬هوضوع و طرح هسئله (اهویت هوضوع و هذف)‪ :‬در ایي پایاى ًاهِ توروس اصللی تلر رٍی هؼرفلی دلیللَ تلِ‬
‫ػٌَاى یه داستاى ًَیس هؼاصر پست هذرى هی تاشذ‪ .‬تذیي هٌظَر دٍ داستاى اٍ اًتخاب شذُ ٍ ػٌاصر پست هلذرى ٍ‬
‫سیر ٍ سلَن ترای یافتي خَد از دست رفتِ تررسی هی گردد‪ .‬اّویت ایي هَضَع تاز وردى فصل جذیلذی در ًظریلِ‬
‫ّای پست هذرى جذیذ هخصَصاً ًظری ِ ّای تَدلیارد ٍ فضای هجازی در دًیای ادتیات هی تاشذ‪.‬‬
‫ة‪ .‬هببنی نظری شبهل هرور هختصری از هنببغ‪ ،‬چبرچوة نظری و پرسشهب و فرضیه هب‪:‬‬
‫حادثِ ‪ 99‬سپتاهثر چِ تأثیری تر رٍی رٍش زًذگی شخصیت ّای رهاى داشتِ است؟ تحراى تِ ٍجَد آهذُ رساًِ ّا ٍ‬
‫فضای هجازی چگًَِ تَاًستِ اس ت هجاز را جایگسیي حمیمت وٌذ؟ آیا در رٍایت داستاًْا ًَػی پیشرفت ٍجَد دارد یلا‬
‫شاّذ پیشرفت ٍ ػمة گرد ّستین؟‬
‫پ‪ .‬روش تحقیق شبهل تؼریف هفبهین‪ ،‬روش تحقیق‪ ،‬جبهؼه هورد تحقیق‪ ،‬نوونه گیری و روشههبی نوونهه‬
‫گیری‪ ،‬ابسار انذازه گیری‪ ،‬نحوه اجرای آى شیوه گردآوری و تجسیه و تحلیل داده ههب‪ :‬تلرای تررسلی رٍشلْای‬
‫ترخَرد تا ػٌاصر پست هذرى‪ ،‬اٍلَیت تا ًظریِ ّای تَدلیارد است وِ در آى فرا ٍالؼیت ٍ ًلَػی هٌغلك هلثْن هغلر‬
‫شذُ است‪ .‬شخصیت ّای ایي در داستاى دٍ سایِ ًظریات تَدلیارد تررسی خَاٌّذ شذ‪.‬‬
‫ت‪ .‬یبفته هبی تحقیق‪ :‬شخصیت ّای داستاى ّای دلیلَ ّ وَارُ در ًَػی ػمة گرد تِ سر هلی ترًلذ ٍ تلرای هؼٌلی‬
‫دادى تِ زًذگی رٍزهرُ ٍ تی َّیت خَد دست تِ خلك فرا رٍایت ّایی هی زًٌذ وِ تِ آًْا ووه هلی وٌلذ تلا جْلاى‬
‫فاًتسی اعراف خَد وٌار تیایٌذ‪.‬‬
‫ث‪ .‬نتیجه گیری و پیشنهبدات‪:‬‬
‫تا تَجِ تِ ٍجَد فضای هجازی در زًذگی پست هذرى‪ ،‬شخصیت ّای داستاى تا ًَػی هاًغ ترای یافتي خَد حمیمی رٍ‬
‫تِ رٍ ّستٌذ‪ّ .‬ر چٌذ تِ ًظر هی رسذ ها شاّذ ػمة گرد ٍ ػذم پیشرٍی رٍایی ّستین اها در ّلر دٍ داسلتاى ًلَػی‬
‫پیشرفت ترای رسیذى تِ هؼٌا ٍجَد دارد ٍ خَد را در لالة چٌذ رٍایت فرػی ًشاى هی دٌّذ‪ .‬اًساًْا ترای رسیذى تلِ‬
‫هؼ ٌای از دست رفتِ هی تَاًذ خَد خالق تاشٌذ ّر چٌذ فرار ٍ رّایی از تٌذ فرا ٍالؼیت ّای تَدلیاردی هوىلي ًولی‬
‫تاشذ زیرا جاهؼِ در حصار رساًِ ّای تصَیری ٍ ایواش لرار دارد‪.‬‬
‫دٍ داستاى هائَی دٍم ٍ هردی در حال حثَط تا داشتي ػٌاصر سیاسی ٍ اجتواػی فراٍاى ٍ ًَػی ًگاُ خاص تِ شرق ٍ‬
‫خاٍر هیاًِ هی تَاًٌذ الگَی خَتی ترای هغالؼِ سیر شرق شٌاسی تاشٌذ ًگاُ شرق شٌاساًِ تحلت ًظلر ادٍارد سلؼیذ‬
‫هی تَاًذ تر رٍی ایي دٍ داستاى اًجام شَد‪.‬‬
‫صحت اعالػات هٌذرج در ایي فرم تر اساس هحتَای پایاى ًاهِ ٍ ضَاتظ هٌذرج در فرم را گَاّی هی ًوایین‪.‬‬
‫نبم استبد راهنوب‪ :‬دوتر سیذ هحوذ هرًذی‬

‫رئیس کتببخبنه‪:‬‬
‫سوت ػلوی‪:‬‬
‫نبم دانشکذه‪:‬‬
‫‪I am honored to dedicate my thesis‬‬
‫‪To the Elysian soul of‬‬
‫‪The Lord of Martyrs‬‬
‫‪Imam Hussein Bin Ali‬‬
‫)‪(PBUH‬‬
‫‪i‬‬
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi for

supervising my thesis and developing new ideas in my mind as
well as for his friendly encouragement, kindness and endless
tolerance. I would like to thank Dr. Kamran Ahmadgoli for taking
the time to read my thesis and for providing excellent comments. I
would like to thank Professor Behzad Ghaderi, and my wonderful
parents who sacrificed everything they had to make me a good
student and a loyal daughter in the presence of our lord God. I also
like sincerely to thank Dr. Zia Tajeddin, Head of the Department
for his kindness and good graces.
ii
Abstract
This thesis project determines to show the postmodern elements of thought
in two novels by American Award- winner writer, Donald DeLillo, Falling Man
and Mao II. The question of postmodern perspectives with respect to new terror-
stricken generation of American society and incredible escalation of postmodern
and post 9122 theories will be the quintessence of my research. Don DeLillo's fame
diffuses as an author who can draw a horrific picture of traumatic situation of
capitalist America which, after the collapse of Twin Towers, encounters a problem
of lacking demarcation between Reality & Chimera. I will show the main
ingredients of post 9/22 that are embedded in postmodern life of DeLillo's
characters in his mentioned novels. Through an organic yet ubiquitous
methodological survey, I will depict my questions of postmodern anxiety and
Artistic role from Ivory Tower to the basement of recluse, the menacing role of the
crowd and also the spirit of terrorism lingering in the society of Disneyland. There
would be actually some findings which will be, categorically speaking, those of
postmodern era, but I expect some results which could be related to an essence of
iii
counter-narrative & meeting place of postmodern & tradition. The epic-like quest
of characters to find their lost identities through myriad of copied and created
realities will be the center of my discussion. The attempt to find a solution for the
question of regressive or redemptive aspect of disaster will be shown in this thesis.
The concept of “Fuzzy Logic” which has been created by Baudrillard will be
scrutinized. In the absence of reality and originality, every perceived reality is a
hyper-reality that has been accepted as a real reality.
iv
‫‪TABLE OF CONTENTS‬‬
‫‪DEDICATION……………………………………………………….... I‬‬
‫‪ACKNOLEDGEMENT…………………………………........….II‬‬
‫‪ABSTRACT…………………………………….……………..III‬‬
‫‪CHAPTER I: Introduction…………………….…….............2‬‬
‫‪Definition of key terms………………………………...…. ....22‬‬
‫‪CHAPTER II: DeLillo, a true postmodern?..........................22‬‬
‫‪CHAPTER III: Moa II: Art & Terror Revisited…..……....53‬‬
‫‪CHAPTER IV: Falling Man:‬‬

‫‪Welcome to Ground Zero, It’s real!......................................35‬‬
‫‪CHAPTER V: Conclusion:‬‬
‫‪Redemption or Regression? ...................................................53‬‬
‫‪Works Cited………………………………………………….88‬‬
‫‪v‬‬
Chapter I
Introduction
"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists ….. Years ago I
used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now
bomb- makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human
consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated" (DeLillo
52).
"They strike a blow to this country's dominance. They achieve this, to show
how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies”
(DeLillo 57).
Donald DeLillo is one of the most controversial writers of America who
has won a distinguished place among postmodern thinkers. Although he always
tried to introduce himself as a modern writer, his indirect style of writing and his
morbid pessimism prove his postmodernist inclinations. His mission is to show the
depth of the American life in light of capitalism and its misery in a fabricated
society. His mind is haunted by the crowd images which represent one vision of
postmodern authorship in which authors employ visual and electronic media to
shape their follower's psyche. According to him violence is the main material of
postmodern ethics. DeLillo used to show it through mass media, photographic
images, cult mentality, and popular culture. DeLlillo‟s most important tool is
vi
language by which he tries to make a complex ontological dilemma and to solve it
through scrutinizing linguistic elements. We can see both postmodern inclination
toward "no expression" and modernist tendency of Joyce toward aestheticism.
DeLillo is anxious to show his ideas on the problematic nature of language, and its
impossibility to represent reality. DeLillo's novelistic idea is an interwoven story
of communism, capitalism, American identity- making and the horror of mass
media. In the realm of postmodernism, he is determined to create a process of
counter- narrative, since The Twin Towers not only did represent the dominance
of capitalist culture but also a part of New Yorkers themselves. He tries to depict
the American lives in light of the 9122. But Falling Man in not his first novel in
which he combines the terror and the essence of life. His strength to compare the
innocent and menacing crowd is conspicuous in his novel, Mao II, which could be
demarcated as an omen for American future just a decade later. It will be
complicated to talk about DeLillo's mental plan without a knowledge of
postmodernism, capitalism, and culture. Don DeLillo is a contemporary author
who has published fifteen novels, three plays, and various short essays in the last
four decades. His work is best known for its depiction and examination of
contemporary American life which is mostly considered as postmodern. After
Derrida's theories, language has been the authority under which society tries to
shape some meaning for its existence. But this society strives to save itself from
discrepancy of popular culture. American society is depicted as a marooned thing
in the heart of representation which is seemingly impossible to be represented.
vii
DeLillo presents a labyrinth in which every reality is allegedly either archaic or
meaningless. The undecidability of meaning is the result of ongoing process of
representation which has been volatile. Although DeLillo is mostly known as a
postmodern chronicler, his initiation is totally modernist. In many of his novels he
shows his skill to picture the environment where he wants to create an epic quest.
He is very modern in his search of an avant- garde form of writing. In doing so, he
is torn between high modernist aesthetics and postmodernism animated by a
modernist avant- garde. The role of the artist is remained problematic as the
society has been grown tense & regressive and this artist is not supposed to be
auspicious in this fatal combat against a system in which they are entangled.
Nevertheless, DeLillo is hawk- eyed enough to detect the artistic effort, however;
such an effort is valuable and painful, not always as fruitful as it seems from the
very beginning. DeLillo appears to perpetuate the morality abused for a long time
in American Society. As a result, DeLillo's idea around damaged morality of
American society to a degree meets theories of French theorist, Jean Baudrillard,
who believes that The World Trade Center attack is a response to the American
system of globalization. The diminished consciousness of American mind had
been assaulted during a very compelling confrontation with globalization project
which attired as an outstanding future for human history.
DeLillo has enough courage to express the trauma of terror in the heart of the
American benumbed nation. His most powerful medium is language which always
viii
oscillates between modernist avant- garde attitude and postmodern centrifugal
force of creation. The focus in this thesis will be partly focused on practicality of
language. In the ruins of paralyzed society, he seeks something beautiful and
vivacious. Here, he turns into a Joycean author, wishing ambition and sublime; as
he said:
It was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that

carried radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor
of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history (De Pietro
88).
Reading DeLillo reminds us of Joycean odyssey in the heart of the American
society. He, in modernity, criticized postmodernity. The evidence is the presence
of modern style of writing which is much more similar to Hemingway and his
economy of language. DeLillo is straight forward and vigorous and has a tightly
controlled style of writing that brings him closer to Hemingway whose sentence is
"a clear, direct and vigorous sentence. It's the simple connective- the word "and"
that strings together the segments of a long Hemingway sentence. The word "and"
is more important to Hemingway than Africa or Paris"(Ibid 251). I can see the
simplicity of Hemingway‟s wording in DeLillo‟s novels, but in DeLillo, I can see
the skillful art to complicate the meaning.
In the presence of terror one of the most comforting voices to emerge is that of the
novelist. His literary vision has been aware of the consumer capitalism and terror.
ix
He soon acquired the agitating concept of terror which gives significance to the
trembling lives of the American nation and helps them to create a new perception
of a nebulous and menacing world. Terror and violence became DeLillo 's massive
artillery to show the poignancy of his words. DeLillo's mentality has been powered
by and, as a result, engaged in the anatomy of terror. The novelist, just like
DeLillo himself, rises as an anesthetic agent who sees himself or herself indulged
in a series of uncanny process of deep thinking of the American trauma. In doing
so, DeLillo has always been a detached novelist, resisting a definitive genre and
avoiding brilliant characters or promising theme.
The terrifying role of mass media and the crisis of the constructed images are the
main anxiety of DeLillo in writing. His style of writing is heterogeneous. Politics
are always masquerading as an exterior fact which triggers the main subject. He
perceives society as a brutal conspirator who is always plotting against the life of
the individual. DeLillo collects his ingredients among terror, catastrophe, murder,
assassination, nuclear explosions, toxic pollution, conspiracy, and foreign and
domestic cultural and epistemological dilemmas. His fiction is shaped through a
kind of a mixed writing out of lots of genres of political thriller, Sci- Fi, religion
and cult culture, and celebrity assassination.
Our controversial age faces a writer in the core of social and cultural criticism who
several times has been accused of being a traitor to the American mind and
nationality as a consequence of his shocking idea to describe "contemporary
x
American society as the worst enemy that the cause of human individuality and
self- realization has ever had"(Lentriccia 6). His sympathy with political dialogue
and ability to represent "the discourses of different cultural milieus", as Mark
Osteen noted in his grand- scaled book on DeLillo's dialogue with culture,
American magic and dread, introduces a highly invented novelist who is capable
of mixing all genres of postmodern subjectivity and all-out war between different
social institutions, between individuals and collectives. He has been influenced by
series of writers like Joyce, Faulkner, and filmmakers like Jean- Luc Godard. His
mind is an image- receptive system to which every aspect of American cinema-
driven society is clear.
DeLillo's elusive career has been constructed from his detachment from public
panels and academy- affiliated councils. The fame is an obscure element in
DeLillo‟s term. He is the American anatomist who undertakes the duty of
scrutinizing cinematic images, mass media and the American conspiracies.
DeLillo is standing apart from society as a modern figure but at the same time he
believes in heterogeneous meaning of mystery, being away from mystery and
being wallowed in mystery. Enigmatic nature of Capitalism and its interwoven
relationship with postmodernized America may generate a contradiction in
DeLillo's novelistic career, for his mind is occupied to show the role of the
individual which is totally complicated in the age of culturally intrigued reality.
The duty of the artist is both clear and complex. His use of political motive is a
xi
device to intervene in existential and ontological gaze through which he watches
the deadly fate of idolized individuality in the middle of chaotic American society.
Most of cultural and literary critics and scholars believe that reading DeLillo is not
a comfortable experience and this sense of anxiety and chaos mostly remains
without solution in his novels. He never offers any comfort and luxury in his ideas
and continues to be cool, austere, and distant. His lack of offering utopia is
annoying and makes him a writer without ideology or critical interest just as he is
seen through his life without any academic, critical and institutional enthusiasm; it
seems that DeLillo's writing is a trap of language game and intriguing political and
social plays. When Jean- Francois Lyotard spoke of the death of grand narratives,
narrative of consumerism, advertising, and propagated images had largely been
considered as new meta narrative of the twentieth century.
These meta narratives of simulation are the absolute belief in different social
activities like shopping, advertising, filmmaking, and investing. These have been
changed into routine way of living in Simulacra with no origin and no first- hand
reality. DeLillo's last resolution is an artificial and mediated reality. This reality is
the very element of the self and the simulacra which has been embraced and
espoused by contemporary American nation. Simulacra are the undeniable part of
our world: The bombardment of consciousness by images is itself a form of
violence. DeLillo, in Anthony De Curtis‟s "An Outsider in This Society", has
described contemporary violence as a kind of bitter response to the promise of
xii
consumer fulfillment. For him, the glorious products and colorful packages and
consumer happiness is a sad consequence of the American picturesque utopia that
has been broken through the eyes of the world. For the world, America and
American values, if any, is an alienating feature from another planet and this is
what makes the American citizen scared.
DeLillo's vision is undoubtedly circular and this characteristic is visible through
his non linear narrative structure. The doomed attempt to find originality is the
only route to find infinite sets of simulacra because of myriad of representations
referring back to other representations.
The social vicious performing images leaves no ground for a committed search of
the true self which has been the most important thematic motif for DeLillo's
novelistic career. His Job with the TV network and fight with cinematic and
commercial images has diminished his identity and subjectivity in the form of a
futile element, hopeless, alienated, and artificially constructed. DeLillo's faithful
devotion to show his (anti) heroes struggling with typical consumer capitalism to
survive but finally cracked in a series of postmodern games. The bondage between
DeLillo and Jean Baudrillard here is rich. The Baudrillardian world of signs is the
domain of simulacrum, in which signs follow "an uninterrupted circuit without
reference or circumference" (Baudrillard, "Simulacra" 271). Illusion is no longer
possible, because the real is no longer possible. The height of this lack of
originality is David Bell's quest to represent himself which is the product of
xiii
cinematic representation, and attempt to find "original David Bell". This is one of
DeLillo's most discussed and depicted themes that anticipated more thematic
innovations in his future fiction.
Every inch of the American life should be detected and analyzed in his fiction
which can be, like Americana, advertising as a prototypical form of the American
life. DeLillo's mind is obsessed with the presentation of high culture and consumer
culture. All social forces are packed as a montage, as a pastiche of guns, media,
shopping, and consumer packaging.
DeLillo's search for self is a postmodernist toil in which society and cultural
jargon cannot be ignored. Mark Osteen also examines the crisis of self and search
for the self in DeLillo's novels. In his article "the Nature of the Diminishing
Existence" Osteen claims that the main characters in DeLillo's works have an
inclination towards pursuing:
An origin that is also an end: search narrows himself to discover

either a life governed by rules that obviate the need for thought
or an end to life itself. Each narrator strives to reduce competing
impulses and discourses into a single- line story that moves
inexorably toward perfect, violent closure. But none of them
finds the solution to their malaise (Osteen 43).
xiv
No one like DeLillo's characters are more stagnated and empty- handed in their
search for the true self. Their search is that of Dedalian modernist alienation and
postmodernist endless regression.
In his both novels, Mao II and Falling Man, death is significant. The postmodern
death is an exaggerated end without any belief. The death of man has been
entangled within the consumerism and culturally plagued aestheticism. DeLillo's
heroes and heroines are determined to postpone their spiritual death through
creation of new narratives in order to avoid the effects of consumer capitalism.
DeLillo‟s artistic career has been broadly scrutinized by academicians and social
journalists who tried to make a demarcation to define DeLillo as a postmodern
thinker in the novelistic zone. An easy search will show a series of books written
by some specialists in DeLillo‟s trend of thought. One of those is Joseph Dewey‟s
Beyond Grief & Nothing: a Reading of Don DeLillo that tries to lay bare the
devices used by DeLillo to define the American grief and its consequences in
order to shape a totally alienated identity. His book is a celebrated masterpiece that
covers the process of creation of DeLillo‟s most famous novels such as Libra,
Mao II, and Underworld. In his attempt, Dewey tries to depict DeLillo‟s exclusive
characteristics of writing through creation of an American myth.
Mark Osteen in his book American Magic and Dread: Don DeLlillo's Dialogue
with culture indicates DeLillo‟s modernist quest through the cult of narration in
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the heart of the American society. Delillo‟s age of artistic birth is the age of two-
dimensionality. Americans live in an image culture, not just a culture in which
images flourish, but a culture in which every one recognizes reality as a fuzzy
logic. Critics have not been slow to recognize the affinity between DeLillo and
Baudrillard. But it seems that DeLillo has been shown as a man of language and
Baudrillard, a man of image. As Osteen puts it, DeLillo's "language is the magic
that diffuses dread"(229). As Osteen believed, the "dialogue" is that of horror
emanated from within the culture. DeLillo is an agent who has been chosen to
show the horror of culture through dialogue.
Intertextuality is the most important element that gives meaning to DeLillo‟s
novelistic career. His mind is sensitive to the cinematic industry, sociology, and
politics, and this perspective helps him to see the diseases of his culture from
many different aspects. DeLillo began to confess the primacy of the cinematic
image. According to him, cinematic images and film industry are being put on the
pedestal and “the image is the essential term in the relationship between the two
media” (Cowart 5). DeLillo tries to connect the image to the semiotics. He
recognizes and examines the way images are related together in a sign system. He
tries to establish an important place for language and stage a battle between image
and word.
Obviously considered as a major American postmodern figure, DeLillo must be
reconsidered and recaptured through a series of theories of simulacrum of which
xvi
Baudrillard is the main creator. The study of Don DeLillo should be undertaken by
some questions about his novelistic chosen samples, Mao II and Falling Man:
What is the role of simulation as an inevitable postmodern device through which
we can give some special definition to the events and coincidences? What is the
process of narrative creation in an ought-to-be postmodern writing career? Does
terrorism play an undermining role in non-progressive narration? What will be the
result of the characters search for the real self in the simulacra environment or,
practically, is it possible? Do we have Narrative of Redemption or Narrative of
Regression? In case of Mao II, is it possible for Bill Gray to be considered as a
real novelist? In Falling Man, how is it thinkable to digest the horror of death and
restart the life of real in the society of Ground Zero?
In the following chapters, the focus will be on the theoretical background of
postmodernism and mostly on the legacy of Baudrillard as the creator of
simulacra. The movement of Modernism to Postmodernism and the recent position
of simulation are of most importance.
DeLillo‟s thought is greatly explicable through his special intricate system of
narration, specific use of language as the heart of being, and his talented
presentation of the unpresentable. A Baudrillardian follower as he is, DeLillo‟s
novels are expressible through the crisis of representation created by Baudrillard‟s
essays and theories. The second chapter will discuss the evolution of
postmodernism through simulation.
xvii
In chapter three, the discussion will be on Mao II, DeLillo‟s work which evolves,
largely, around the concept of authorship in the age of terror and its position in
comparison to that of the terrorist. The role of the artist is at full climax when it
comes to consider the terror as a new force whose traumatic radiance puts the
whole writing system in danger. The crisis of mass media and the leading role of
simulation will be the acme of my attention.
In the fourth chapter, the outcome of Twin Towers attack upon the lives of NY
inhabitants will be reviewed, Keith and Lianne and the beginning of a new
narrative of regression and redemption. Their postmodern condition and search to
find the true self creates an outstanding process of narration through some events
of social and domestic challenge. The main concern is the possibility of presenting
the very moment of “touch the wall” and anatomy of terror through the
postmodern reading.
Definition of Key Terms
Apocalypse: A belief in upcoming end of the World and Millennium
xviii
Fuzzy Logic: stated by Jean Baudrillard to mention the foggy demarcation
between reality and imagination resulting in a hazy logical reason that pretends to
be real reality.
Ground Zero: The site of World Trade Centre in New York destroyed on 22
September 3112.
Postmodernism: A new theoretical and epistemological era in culture, literature,

art and architecture which postulates the collapse of hierarchical and institutional
established beliefs in truth, reality, etc.
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Chapter II
DeLillo: a true postmodern?
The main interest of Postmodernism is that of “Intertextuality”, coined by
Julia Kristeva, through which postmodern thinkers try to debate over different
social, cultural, and philosophical problems. Today‟s American society is highly
multicultural, media-driven, and trauma-stricken in which living is a great war
against “the society of spectacle”, a philosophical and critical theory invented by
Guy Debord. DeLillo‟s artistic career is shaped through this process. His elusive
career is a result of a volatile thinking between Modernist alienation and
Postmodernist regression. In his novels, the protagonist‟s main conflict is to
challenge the photographic and cinematic society in which he or she has been
immured. DeLillo‟s character tries to alienate him or herself from the unknown
image-driven society that tries to betray him or her.
After that Jean-Francois Lyotard announced the death of “grand narrative and of
the incommensurability of local language games” in his “postmodern condition”,
the whole literary prospect seemed to be disappointed from reaching to a unique
interpretation. The art of interpretation becomes more and more like a freeway of
endless and ongoing choices that readers make.
Postmodernism is a critical reaction to the project of Modernity and, as Lyotard
puts it, a reaction to all ideological attempts which failed to reach “general human
xx
emancipation” (Ibid 81). According to him, the main shift of attitude in
postmodernism is to make a “Bricolage” (Ibid 81), an architectural intertextuality
between literature, culture, film industry, politics, and philosophy.
Don DeLillo‟s novelistic career works like a mediator between high-modernist
avant-gardism and postmodernist popular culture which is obvious in many of his
successful novels like Libra and Underworld. But is it true to consider him as a
true postmodern figure who personally tries to escape from? The answer is
ambivalent because DeLillo the citizen is a postmodern contemporary American
who lives his life in the society of images. But DeLillo the novelist tries to be a
true modern figure who favors the escape to the ivory tower of high-modernism.
For postmodernism, intertextuality, word play, and poetic liberty are important
and this is the exact realm of DeLillo who is the absolute mastermind in showing
his character playing in dread, joy, and loss in the context of the words. He takes
liberty in using words in the form of a pastiche in order to have new opportunities
of interpretation and articulation. As Jameson describes a related practice,
Pastiche:
is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique,

idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask , speech in a
dead language . But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without
any of parody‟s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse,
devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal
tongue you have momentarily borrowed, same healthy linguistic
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normality still exits. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with
blind eyeballs (Jameson 27).
Pastiche, like other forms of intertextuality, sustains a linguistic universe in which
reference to the external world is neither necessary nor desirable. Discouraged
with the material existence, and living in a world of simulated reality, the
postmodern subject experiences a “waning of affect”, in which psychology and
cultural depth are replaced by Simulacra.
For DeLillo, the most crucial point is to present the unpresentable. His mind is
sublime-receptive because his writing is a battlefield for search of sublime. While
reading DeLillo, the reader spots his style of writing so simple and without any
novelistic complication. But in this simplicity, a good reader witnesses another
Hemingway in DeLillo‟s clothing. DeLillo‟s long and lenient paragraphs
sometimes hide his multifaceted intentions.
DeLillo analytical writing has great affinity with the anatomy of language since he
is interested in cogent power of language to put the readers in a maze from which
the only possible exit is decoding the sign systems. He makes profit from the
leading notions of post structuralism in rejecting the possibility of having one
absolute interpretation and tries to leave an open-ended ground for readers to have
the chance of over interpretations. Of course it is not possible to find Thomas
Pynchon‟s labyrinth of meaning in DeLillo‟s Mao II and Falling Man, but this
makes the work of decoding even harder because the appearance of DeLillo‟s
xxii
novels are so shallow and striking that makes a reader completely baffled in search
of meaning and this exclusive feature puts him on the pedestal of contemporary
novelistic career.
DeLillo deals with the sublime but not that of the nature but that of human
experience. His discourse is the theatre of dread, despair, anxiety, and bitter
experience and these human traits should be shown through creating an
overwhelming sense of sublime and his heroic task is to show that it is a
presentation that is totally unpresentable.
In the eyes of postmodernism, the process of legitimate interpretation is no longer
possible because it depends on language games which make the reader much more
emancipated in the process of interpretation. From now the question of
representation and imitation is not the point. DeLillo is without doubt the scholar
of simulacra and the anatomist of the stolen reality. Now there will be the crisis of
reality, the question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.
Simulation is the realm of no palpable object, the realm of no truth. It is the
kingdom of signs lording over the reality, a world in which, as Baudrillard puts it,
“signs of the real” replaced the real “God, Man, Progress, and History itself die to
profit the code” (Simulation 222). In the world of simulation, there is a tangible
loss of any kind of referentiality. In the absence of the “real”, there is only the
“hyperreal. So we witness the crisis of real reality. As Baudrillard calls it, there are
“four successive phases of the image”. These phases have to do with the sign or
xxiii
image‟s successive disaffection from the object of representation (or referent), so
that the sign travels through following phases of signification and value:
 It is the reflection of a basic reality
 It masks and perverts a basic reality
 It masks the absence of a basic reality
 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure
simulacrum (Baudrillard 22).
It is so weird that such hyperreality can exist so real as the appearance of itself,
because the function or the postmodern sign is to disguise the fact that reality is no
longer with us. Thus the third order sign, which conceals the absence of reality, is
connected to the final order or the real truth of the postmodern sign: that there is
no reality outside the sign, or outside simulation. He, then, gives the example of
Disneyland, which is “there to conceal the fact that is the … real America” (Ibid
36).
Disneyland is the result of the process of hyperreality, the mere product of
the system of signs, the simulacra. It is the representative of the absent reality of
America which makes it present in the American mindset. The fanatic appearance
of Disneyland function to make the rest of America seem real, as if there were still
some way of distinguishing between appearance and reality. Reality has
disappeared and in its place there are only the signs and systems, the simulacra.
Disneyland is not the fantastic cut off from real America: It is the very origin of
the possibility of the appearance of America as real in a postmodern world. “It is
xxiv
meant to be an infantile world in order to make us believe that adults are
elsewhere, in the “Real” world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is
totally every where, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child
in order to faster illusions as their real childishness.” Disneyland, then, is both a
third – order sign and a simulacrum of the highest order, making it completely
ordinary.
In this case, History is supposed to be a sign that has lost all meaning and that it no
longer refers to anything outside itself, or having been divided. This idea is far too
difficult to impress me because there has always been a great vision of History for
the people and still it has a great meaning. History was supposed to have a real
path toward progress and purpose. But according to simulational way of thinking,
it becomes empty and void of meaning and causes all signs to be totally
meaningless and empty. So we can‟t have History because we have nothing but
change. We live in “information society” and suffer from the disease of signs. Our
lives are defined in the process of image-making in the science of third-order
signs. Our habitual living among hyperreality stems from its digestible
characteristic of being very normal.
What area of knowledge can be found to define the inexpressible? What name
should be given to the genre that is proper to the expression of the inexpressible,
the presentation of unpresentable? Every system or genre of representation, then,
becomes a system for revelation, since there is always something more to be
xxv
defined and redefined. The lesson of non-expression is that the ultimate expression
is totally out of reach.
The crucial point begins here and it is that of sublime. What might be called the
absolute communication may be understood as having been reached at the point
when it‟s felt that there is still something like communication going on, and this
brings sublime.
The crisis of communication is the center of debate. Lyotard‟s belief in
postmodern experience of our encounter with telecommunication media, through
which only communication without communication is possible, shows the lack of
such an absolute sense of sublime, since today‟s communications technologies are
mere possibilities of virtual communication, which lacks the immediate rise of
aesthetic feelings, thus postmodern sublime in art could be only what lacks beauty,
form, and genre, in a sense, what belongs to an amorphous text. The postmodern
area of communication – without – communication is synonymous to the romantic
genre of literature as the name of what can never be present either in or to itself. In
this sense, genre is always beyond genre, unpresentable.
The postmodern sublime is here to show that there is something that should be
expressed but at the same time is inexpressible. The postmodern sublime is much
indebted to the ideas of Lyotard who developed the term as a pleasing sense of
anxiety in the presence of the unpresentable. Its essence is to remain absolutely
incomplete, forever in the process of becoming. But Romantic idealist lack of
expression with the aim of immediate response of sublime is far too difficult to be
xxvi
compared with postmodern silence and lack of expression. The Romantic sublime
is an idealistic gesture toward an astounding sense of awe and grandeur which is a
result of some overwhelming beauty that flies in the mind. The idea of Romantic
sublime emerged as an experience in the presence of inexpressible which is
indebted to Kant. But postmodern sense of sublime should be aware of its
incapability to find an idealistic zone because any Hegelian teleological system of
though is considered totally demised in the eyes of postmodernism.
The idealism of Romantic thought is completely finished in postmodern writing.
Literature is an assemblage, a bricolage; it has nothing to do with idealism. The
old idealistic school of Romanticism is now nothing more that an incomplete quest
for something inexpressible. There is no ideology and never has been. In real
postmodern works, there are lots of roots and multiplicities which make them rich
with infinite possibilities. The painful journey for finding an absolute range of
possible interpretation is over. Joyce‟s words, described as having many roots,
shatter the linear unity of the work, even of language, only to shape a cyclic unity
of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Language is essentially a heterogeneous
reality. The knowledge in postmodernism is miscellaneous. Language is a being,
which is alive with its organic unity. It is like the plants with roots and radicals,
rhizomatic. This concept is created by Deleuze and Guattari in their influential
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Any point of a rhizome can be connected to
anything other. The apparent and simplistic discrepancy between different parts of
language unites in the form of roots of the plants that come to one sharing point to
xxvii
make sense. Interpretation in the postmodern mindset can be ongoing and open-
ended just like a rhizome. This is the system of cyclic postmodernist novel which
is full of possibilities of interpretations and re – interpretations, writing and re –
writing, revision and reconsideration.
As we have seen, much postmodernist analysis is an attack on authority and
reliability in philosophy, narrative, authenticity and canons. We have only realism
lost and faded away and as Fredric Jameson believes a disappearance of a sense of
history in the culture is a kind of painful inclination toward a depth without end.
This kind of belief inculcates that we have a rupture in History and now there is
only “histories” that are perceived and interpreted only through countless of points
of view. Every immediate event like Vietnam and Gulf wars are dramatized media
events. They are the noisy and exaggerated events that are formed and analyzed
through the capacity of postmodern man for absorbing the power of images. This
feeling that the mass media substitute images for reality arises in various ways that
is a direct attack on realism.
Jameson likes the idea that there is a “crisis of representation”. His idea is that,
with postmodernity, signs have been delighted of their function of referring to the
world, and this causes the expansion of the power of social life into the realm of
the sign, of culture and representation that brings calamity and deterioration to the
freedom of autonomy.
We are enmeshed in an image-plagued and media-driven world of signs, which
only refer to one another within a cycling chain of ideas.
xxviii
In this epoch of capitalist development, economic concentration, new production
techniques, mass production and the development of new technologies, the
capacity for capitalist corporations focused attention on managing consumption
and creating needs for new product. Advertising, packaging, fashion, boundless
sexuality, mass media and culture, and the propagation of commodities increased
the quantity of signs and spectacles. The society of commodification is alive with
the valuable sign systems that are able to attract the attention of people who are
maddeningly in search of the products of simulation. In a sense, Baudrillard rejects
the epoch of signifier / signified production. For him the only meaningful reality is
the hyperreality which is a third-order sign. Simulacra are his new credo since
signs are stripped of any real meaning and this simulation now is the dominant
bible of society. Community is entrapped in the zone of simulation in which social
reproduction (information process, communication, and knowledge industries)
replaces material production as the organizing form of society. People accept and
buy this new production because the fundamental reality in the society is nothing
more than the crowned cult of hyperreality. Instead people live in the
“hyperreality“ of simulations in which images, spectacles, and the play of signs
replace the concept of production and class conflict. For Baudrillard, there is a
rupture between modernity and postmodernity, since modern societies are planned
around the production and consumption of commodities and through this doctrine
cities and societies are shaped, while postmodern societies are controlled by
simulation and the take part in the play of images and signs, describing a situation
xxix
in which codes, models, and signs are the forms of a new social order where
simulation rules. In the society of simulation, identities and meanings are
constructed by the images and these signs and codes determine how each identity
and individuality should be defined and perceived, how should be known to the
identity itself. Baudrillard‟s postmodern world is also one in which previously
important margins and distinctions such as those between social class conflicts,
genders, political inclinations, and once self-sufficient sphere of society and
culture lose power. For Baudrillard, postmodern societies are characterized by the
collapse of distinctions, or “implosion“. In Baudrillard‟s society of simulation
differences between individuals and groups implode rapidly and the social and the
previous boundaries and structures upon which social theory had once focused
shatter. All social institutions implode together and become the mass society and
every individual should be defined in relation to newly established society under
the surveillance of hyperreality. This postmodern world is one of hyperreality in
which any information and communication technologies provide experiences more
intense and involving than any kind of realism.
The new reality is hyperreality, through which the models, images, and codes of
the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior. Thus, Baudrillard‟s categories
of simulation and hyperreality combine to create a postmodern condition that
requires utterly new modes of theory and politics to respond to the novelties of the
current period. This style and writing strategies are implosive; combining material
from different fields of mass media and popular culture, making an assemblage
xxx
that does not respect disciplinary boundaries and this kind of pastiche will be the
new form of expressing the inexpressible. In postmodern era, representation has
been replaced by a kind of intertextuality that paves the way for a new creative
genre of presentation in which all texts and works are connected through the
domain of images and simulacra. Of course by using this strategy the postmodern
psyche will be able to triumph over the complex systems of signs. In this
postmodern situation, the referent disappears. We are liberated in a world without
any sense of referentiality. In the absence of referent, people try to find pure
fantasy instead of pure reality. Here comes the spectacle and cult of image. For
Baudrillard, sign-values dominate because the new society is that of signs and
images. The authenticity is that of photographic images that can prove their
genuine existence through the new Baudrillardian simulation rules. His
postmodern characterization serves as an assault on the notion of identity and
brings the crisis of the self to the surface. DeLillo‟s style of writing is centered
around this challenge for define true identity and, even greater, to show and prove
the existence of identity. His mind is preoccupied with the question of a battle of
individuality in the imploded mass society. Whereas previously characters were
considered as totally present, postmodern characters are absent from their selves.
Postmodern characters fall into incoherence. There is a possibility of an
individuality reduced to an object of simulation. The information society brings an
end to the independence of identity. So there remains only a little chance for the
character to become “incorporated”. Survival is possible only through
xxxi
incorporation. DeLillo‟s characters especially in his two mentioned novels, Mao II
and Falling Man try to live on by means of become incorporated in the society of
simulation. But it can‟t be denied that the finality of characters is jeopardized in
the excess of information. There is a difficulty with the notion of “representation”
of a character whose condition is that it is never present to itself in the first place.
Postmodern narrative disturbs the demarcation of the identity. So the struggle
remains in the process of finding the authentic self. DeLillo„s skill is to depict this
anxiety of such a fruitless search which usually left without a remedy or a hard-to-
find one.
Coming back to the question of DeLillo as a true postmodern, the idea has many
facets. From modern point of view, he is a man of modernist quest to find the true
self of his characters as we can see Bill Gray as DeLillo‟s wannabe who wants to
rescue himself from the limbo of his artistic career and the ennui of revisions and
rewritings. Many of DeLillo‟s readers see him through the adventures of Bill
Gray, but the characteristic that makes him utterly singular is bringing the element
of terror to the surface of discussion as a new diabolic life force which has the
amazing power to change the fortune of the character in his or her search in the
society of information.
The fame of DeLillo as a novelist goes side by side with the reputation of
Baudrillard‟s new theoretical findings especially in his article, The Spirit of
Terrorism, where he opens some new dimensions of American terror-stricken
society which force Bill Gray to resume a quest to find out about a kidnapped poet
xxxii
in Mao II and Keith, the protagonist of Falling Man, to reconsider the events that
caused great distress in his cold relationship with his estranged wife after the
collapse of WTC.
According to Baudrillardian theory of simulation, the reality is absent in the
presence of lack of referent, so the ultimate criterion to interpret is the criterion of
the society of information. DeLillo‟s strategy to come through the art of narration
in the society of spectacle is to create a counter narrative, the alternative way to
say his ideas.
xxxiii
Chapter III
Mao  : Art & Terror scrutinized
Mao II, DeLillo‟s award-winner novel which is published in 2992, with its famous
Andy Warhol‟s silk-screen Mao II is a masterpiece of postmodern society through
which DeLillo tried to find out a meaning, The lives of its protagonists, Bill Gray,
Brita Nilsson, Karen Janney, and Scott Martineau are in the center of the search to
find the true meaning of existence in an image-plagued society which suffers from
the loss of reality. Baudrillard's concept of simulacra again becomes an important
factor, not only in understanding the postmodern elements in the novel, but also in
that the protagonists in the novel are baffled by a loss of origin. The new
American warfare system has changed the picture of narration. So their search for
true self is totally under the spell of simulacra.
Baudrillardian concept of hyperreal is the leading force that directs the whole
process of this search. The photographic feature of Mao II in Warhol‟s famous
silk-screen picture is a menacing force of image which comes to challenge the
magic of language. The spectacular society of images is the new enemy of lost
reality and, to some extent, the new enemy of writer who tries to be conspicuous
in the age of simulation. In the system of signs, the language is that of terrorism.
So the author‟s mission is to challenge both terrorism and simulacra.
Mao II begins with a mass wedding at Yankee Stadium, in which Karen begins his
journey of self-discovery. In her quest, she turns to religion. But this ends in
xxxiv
joining a religious cult. She loses her identity to the mass mindset of this religious
cult. In doing so, she gains identity as soon as she becomes part of this religious
group. But this is somehow injurious because in the society of cult she loses her
identity to the interests of the group. In order to complete her misfortune, she
married a Korean stranger named Kim.
The picturesque wedding scene is a clear testament of the detained character in the
society of spectacle. Here DeLillo‟s use of intertextuality is evident. The event of
mass wedding in the cult of Moonies happens under the influence of a hidden
desire to be connected to some independent group. But this autonomy acts as a
detrimental disease to the real identity. The absence of reality and the presence of
simulation make the quest of characters entirely affected because the independent
search for finding the true self is impossible since the identity itself is no longer
autonomous.
Karen‟s need to find an origin and a surrogate for the long lost reality doesn‟t
alleviate, so she turns to the cult of Moonies. But the ideological attitude of this
religious cult is less that of divine revelation and sacred devotion to God than the
American capitalist benefit. Metaphorically speaking, the characters like Karen, as
a result, change into a cog, a puppet in the hands of the system of
commodification.
Don DeLillo‟s mission is to theorize the place of author in the condition of
simulation when there is no origin, no center except that of contingency. What is
xxxv
the meaning of the novelistic career in the media-saturated society when the
subjectivity of people is constantly assaulted by the fake authenticity of images?
Bill Gray, the protagonist of the story, lives totally detached and secluded from the
American capitalist society and tries to shape his writing career. His wish is to live
in the artistic high-modernism. He is determined to preserve his self-sufficiency
from the assault of the media and spectacle. His prophetic mission is to restore a
divine status for the novelistic career as a genre of high art.
In doing so, he goes through a series of rewritings and revisions. The painstaking
course of lots of revisions is a defense against the waves of popular art and
cinematic cult.
Gray‟s great anxiety is the power of information society that tries to inculcate
some messages about a series of traumatic events. In Mao II Bill Gray notes on the
same question: "News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the
news, the grander the narrative (Mao II 53). The new wave of narration is
accelerated through perceiving the tragic news from all over the world.
Bill Gray mindset is sensitive to the political disasters like tragic turbulances
around the world. DeLillo quotes Bill to show the depth of his anxiety over the
power of news:
The novel used to feed our search for meaning. It was the great
secular transcendence, The Latin mass of language, character, and
occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward
something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides
an unremitting mood of catastrophe ( 73).
xxxvi
The society of information is entangled in catastrophe and the author explains a
strong sense of harassment in the consciousness of the characters. The attempt to
understand the "meaning" of world events is perturbed by the flood of information
about various violence, deaths, and catastrophes. The assault of spectacle and
disaster in the novel make characters disturbed by desperation and even force them
through it, knowing more about it, and having desire to spot more events and more
sets of information.
DeLillo‟s inclination toward showing different tragic events which are the result
of various political, ideological, economic and technological developments is also
noticeable in some of his famous works like White Noise, Libra, and Underworld.
Bill Gray stresses the significance of the novelist's engagement with the shaping of
human consciousness and culture through the art of narrative. He is a lonely
dissenter who shuts himself off from the dominant economic and ideological
agents. For him the interior side of artistic career serves as a deadly blow to the
society of information. He feels resentment against the loss of such an ideal state.
His opinion about the terrorist‟s power to "make raid on human consciousness"
inculcates the miserable state of the novelistic profession in the loss of novelist's
power to make artistic and idealistic impact on human consciousness.
So terrorists are new forces of aggression that acts as substitutes of power in the
society. Their devastating act of killing and assaulting is an aggressive source of
sublime, an awe that imposes itself on the mind of people who were in the habit of
seeing this sublime in the art of writing.
xxxvii
Bill Gray has always been trying to keep himself totally detached from the society
since the outside area of his home is fully occupied by the spectacular world of
images. He doesn‟t want to mention himself through photographic advertisement.
He is afraid of being in the eyes of media-saturated society. But his meeting with
Brita the photographer brings him out of his refuge. Somewhere else, through the
abundance of information, he spots the disastrous condition of a Swiss UN agent,
an intellectual and a poet, who has been kidnapped by a terrorist group in the
Middle East. Once again he becomes enmeshed in the tragic news and the flood of
information and leaves his quiet state to find the truth about the conflicts of the
world.
The beginning of his journey is the end of his life. He gets badly injured in an
accident but he refused to be transferred to the hospital and be treated. He reflects
that:
He was getting to know it well. Sometimes a pain feels familiar even

as it hits you for the first time. Certain conditions seem to speak out
of some collective history of pain. You know the experience from
others who have had it. Bill felt joined to the past, to some bloodline
of intimate and renewable pain (297).
Douglas Keesey comments on Bill meaningless and meager death and says that:
He feels that it connects him with all the people who have been
injured under terrorism. The more he dramatizes his link with the
people, the further he distances himself from any true connection
xxxviii
with them. They would not leave their wounds untreated to serve as
mere symbols of suffering (Keesey 293).
The change of Bill‟s fortune is somehow strange and incredible, but the ongoing
process of writing and revisions made him worn out and anxious to find something
new and overwhelming. The political context of the world permits him to know a
new position, a position that is stolen from literature. Maybe this attempt is a
reaction to his disappointing artistic career that is no longer flourishing.
The postmodern characters of the novel, like Bill and Karen, are somehow
decentered and without origin. They are the characters of fragmentation. The
hyperreality forces them to make a sham identity because there is no reality trough
which they have the ability to introduce themselves. Karen, in order to define
herself, marries a man she doesn‟t know in a mass wedding celebration in Yankee
Stadium. The individuality is dead among so many couples. Her identity is so
stolen that her father “can‟t help but thinking this is the point. They‟re one body
now, an undifferentiated mass, and this makes him uneasy” (Mao II 4). Even
binoculars are not able to find her. It is her choice, her fate not to be an individual
and to live with another amorphous individual. Sometimes, she is the girlfriend of
Scott and occasionally sleeps with Bill. This shows the fathomless fragmentation
in her character. Ultimately, when she heard the news about Bill‟s departure
toward Beirut, “she was all drift and spin” (253).
xxxix
Bill suffers from a fissure in his mentality. He is a fugitive and a hermit who
doesn‟t want to be spotted by mass media. He tries to separate himself from the
postmodern world outside his protected existence. In doing so, his condition is
only intensified and he becomes more and more an iconic figure. He lives among
such destabilized and formless context that forces him to leave it and to surrender
to a more decentered political harassment. His journey to Beirut is the result of
inability to finish his job as a literary figure.
What is the role of Brita Nilsson as a representative of popular art? She is the
agent of postmodern cult of photography. She is the origin of power in the society
and defines Bill‟s situation through the empire of images. She wants to make an
iconic personality by photographing Bill. She is the first one who brings him out
of his shelter. The power that once was under the control of the intellectuals now
comes to control them. Brita the photographer and Abu Rashid the terrorist are the
pillars of power in the world of information. As Bill puts it:
Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the
inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken
that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What
writers used to do before we were all incorporated (52).
The society of information enforces great power on the mind of the writers. Now
terrorists are in a great competition with the writers. They use the sense of terror to
xl
inculcate power in the hearts and minds of the people. Bill describes the terror like
this to Brita:
This is why you travel a million miles photographing writers.

Because we‟re giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape
recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News
of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news,
the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before-what? I
don‟t know. But you‟re smart to trap us in your camera before we
disappear (53).
Brita Nilsson has an incredible authority to diminish Bill Gray into a mere
commercial object. She makes him commodified. In such a crucial condition, Bill
is not able to preserve his artistic career because his writing is no longer powerful;
it is no longer able to impress the media-plagued society. So he consciously or
unconsciously tries to change his fortune through traveling to the Middle East in
order to comprehend more about the news of catastrophe.
The images are dreadful, showing the immense crowd gathering in one place. The
example is what Karen feels when she spots the huge gathering people in the
funeral of late Ayatollah Khomeini. The overwhelming image of the crowd is not
digestible for her, just as the crowd in Yankee Stadium attending the wedding
ceremony is not credible for her father. Here there is a restricted area for the
cameras to cover all mourners. She feels a sense of sublime when watching the
funeral from television:
xli
It was the body of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini lying in a glass case
set on a high platform above crowds that stretched for miles. The
camera could not absorb the full breadth of the crowd. The camera
kept planning but could not inch all the way out to the edge of the
anguished mass. On the screen the crowd had no edge or limit and
kept on spreading.
Here Delillo creates a beautiful picture of the image industry. Although it is the
most powerful element in the society of spectacle, it knows some limits. The
whole crowd can not be captured through media. But the sense of immediacy was
the purpose of DeLillo when he drew a picture of this glorious funeral. He brings
Karen to the depth of mourners and makes her feel the same as those faithful
mourners. She knows nothing about Ayatollah Khomeini, though she knows him
well through the professional effect of the images.
Here, camera is successful in creating the sense of sublime, to express the
inexpressible. It makes the spectator like Karen totally baffled. It brings Southern
Teheran available to her. Now she can mourn just like those unknown Iranian
people. Such an impressive experience is the result of visual media which has
formed the mindset of the postmodern human being.
The postmodern society shows its happiness, anger, terror, and violence not
through the pages of books but through the cameras and photographs. So the
inexpressible encounters the inadequacy of language to express its gigantic range
of meaning. That why we can see some pictures in DeLillo‟s Mao II, a huge
xlii
picture of a gathering in Tiananmen square in China and an impressive portrait of
Ayatollah Khomeini and lots of people standing in front of it.
The surreptitious role of image is to terrify and terrorize through creating awe and
admiration. This is the task of simulation to put the society in crisis. Terror is the
new challenge of language as DeLillo believes that the only language that he
knows and cares about is Beirut where DeLillo claims the death of the author. But
this death is both literal and virtual. The demise of author happens when his
ideological trend of thought is killed in the presence of simulation. His virtual
death results in his literal death in a car accident. When his artistic career becomes
weak and powerless, he tries instead to compete with Brita through language in
order to conceal his weakness. As Mark Osteen notes this author:
Imitates the discourse he aims to deconstruct and thereby generates a

dialogue with those cultural forms that both criticizes their
consequences and appropriates their advantages (Osteen 312).
Delillo‟s idea, as mentioned before, is interested in different widespread world-
conflicts like what happened in Tiananmen Square in China, funeral of Ayatollah
Khomeini in Iran, the turbulence of terrorists in Beirut, and even the activities of
the cult of Moonies in New York. All of these events matter to DeLillo. As he
states, “the true terror is a language and a vision” (DeLillo 8). He describes Brita
as:
Radio voices calling all around her. Beirut, Beirut. They crowd in
toward her, pressing with a mournful force. People calling from
xliii
basement shelters, faces in shadow, clothing going dark with heavy
sweat, sleeping children curled around their war toys. All the
hostages pray for them stashed in their closets and toilets. All the
babies pray for them lying in rag hammocks. All the refugees pray
for their dead and wait for the shelling to subside. The war is so
fucking simple. It is the lunar part of us that dreams of wasted
terrain. She hears their voices calling across the leveled city. Our
only language is Beirut (Mao II 349).
Beirut‟s tragic events and suffering is the center of debate. What is the
characteristic of this disturbed city of Lebanon which made Bill Gray restless to
know more about the disaster? The only answer will be the minimalism and
worldwide apocalyptic sense of sharing between West and East. The pain of
Beirut is the pain of Bill the New Yorker. His authorial work is ended in his search
to find this shared sense of terror.
Bill‟s virtual death comes through Brita‟s shooting. This is the end of Bill Gray
the recluse and the birth of Bill Gray the icon. He talks about „‟the death of the
author‟‟ in an ironical attitude:
I‟m playing the idea of death. Look closely… Something about the
occasion makes me think I‟m at my own wake Sitting for a picture is
morbid business. A portrait doesn‟t begin to mean anything until the
subject is dead. This is the whole point…The deeper I pass into
death, the more powerful my picture becomes ( 53)
xliv
This sort of comment is an attempt to give definition to his inevitable death. So his
photo is an “obituary”, a death notice. He becomes a victim to the aggressive
nature of photograph. But his iconic identity is recognized through the process of
his gradual death. As Baudrillard said, the images are murderers of the real”
(Baudrillard 21). This happens as Bill Gray is murdered by the lethal capacity if
images.
Bill finds unification in being killed just like Karen, who finds relief and
unification through becoming one body in mass wedding. In doing so, she is
immersed and absorbed in simulation. She is known through simulation. This is
implosion. All structures of the society implode as one unified being that has no
origin, no referent. And this makes it decentered and shapeless. Simulation is
eradicator, that of reality and what signifies that reality, so the boundary between
signifier and signified. Bill and Karen become dissolved because of lack of reality
and what that reality implies. This is exactly what terrorist does. He eliminates the
targeted reality but in an idealistic manner because the terrorist is a believer, a man
of ideology. He wants to be seen through his anger and bestiality, he wants to be
believed and, at the same time, to be afraid of.
Personal and private identity is always in a menacing atmosphere of deterioration.
Ideology and individuality are the targeted by postmodern lack of origin and any
ideological ground. So the result is nothing more than contingency, fluidity and
destruction of the independent identity. Abu Rashid, as a terrorist, tries to hide his
individuality behind the hood and forces the boys of his group to do so. They
xlv
defend their ideology behind their masks. Their mind is obsessed with the idea of
masks. They are afraid of showing their faces because they are aware of the
menacing role of cameras and images.
The photographic society sees everything through picture. Terrorist‟s mask is a
reaction to meddling act of cameras to absorb them into one crowd. Terrorists
want to be identified and introduced by their masks which represent their
ideological mission and anxiety. They abhor the system of simulation because it
leads them to some sort of decentered life under the aegis of hyperreality. Abu
Rashid becomes another Maoist leader just like Mao himself. In Tiananmen
Square in China, the impact of Mao is imposed upon everybody. Every individual
is absorbed in Mao‟s impact. So they become Mao I, Mao II, Mao III, etc. The
only thing that remains is the Maoist effect of being another Mao Zedong. So Mao
II is the impact of a promising leader who wants to be accepted through
mechanism of images. People like him and accept him when they see his
impressive portrait in Tiananmen Square. Andy Warhol‟s silk-screen Mao II
The same situation exists about Bill Gray who enjoys his seclusion and hermitage.
He has some ideologies to preserve. He has an individuality to protect. But the
society of spectacle wants to destabilize him through making him a picturesque
and commodified object. The imperialistic mission of spectacle is to make a
lifeless object from the author. Bill wants to protect and hide his ideology through
writing and revision but the world of simulation disappoints him. He
acknowledges his fear and weakness in the presence of spectacle. He is aware of
xlvi
the power of an unknown author. “When a writer doesn‟t show his face,” says
Bill, “he becomes a local symptom of God‟s famous reluctance to appear” (Mao II
47). So if he appears, he becomes as powerless as a meager thing. In his reluctance
to appear, he wants to be as famous and powerful as God. When he becomes
famous through images, he surrenders to the fringe of history. The center of
history belongs to the simulacrum, to the lack of reality.
Bill feels great distress in his destabilization since he is aware of his impotency as
a writer in the presence of simulacrum. For him, language has lost its magical
supremacy:
The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There‟s a moral

force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer‟s
will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting
a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about
myself. I‟ve worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not
long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in language
(Mao II 58).
Here comes the problem of authorship. Bill‟s inability to find his way through his
writing is the painful symptom of the death of the authorship. The devastating task
of endless rewritings and revisions are absolutely fruitless. Under the pressure of
his inability, he accepts to surrender to the world of image. Brita the photographer
accepts the mission of transferring Bill the recluse to Bill the photographic icon.
She wonders about the reason of her cinematic task:
xlvii
It took me a long time to find out what I wanted to photograph. I
came to this country. It‟s fifteen years. To this city actually. And I
roamed the streets first day, taking pictures of city faces, eyes of city
people, slashed men, prostitutes, emergency rooms, forget it, I did
this for years…But after years of this I began to think it was
somehow, strangely-not valid…Then you know what you want to do
at last…I will just keep on photographing writers, every one I can
reach, novelists, poets, playwrights… This is what I do now.
Writers. (Mao II 35).
Somewhere else, the power of spectacle is under scrutiny. The clear example is
that of Karen obsessive dealing with the images. As a true postmodern figure that
has no center and origin, she is totally submitted to the magic of image when she
saw the gigantic portrait of Mao Zedong in Scott‟s room.
DeLillo‟s style of writing is so simple and uncomplicated that makes his novelistic
career so unprofessional. This situation in his novel is the clear evident of the
supremacy of image and spectacle. Although DeLillo‟s mission is to show the lost
power of the author to impress and influence the society under the assault of mass
media, he tries to keep himself as a living voice that is still present and able to
convey the meaning for life. He still can show the author as an agent who can
express himself through the process of narration. When reading Mao II, the reader
spots different elusive styles and tactics that make the author continue his
narrative.
xlviii
The novel depicts a crazy terrorist who leads another bankrupt city. Abu Rashid
seeks to imitate Mao's public relations feat by having his murderous followers
wear hoods and announce their identity in the image pinned to their chests: the
face of Abu Rashid. Thus, DeLillo focuses on the desire to lose the self in the
personality of the charismatic leader.
The connotation of the image-makers is outstanding in the mind of Brita who
travels to Beirut, where militias five at the photos of other militia leaders ( 339), to
photograph terrorist leader Abu Rashid. Departing, she shakes Rashid's hand,
"pronouncing her name slowly” ( 347) as if to say, “You are nothing without me."
Brita's behavior suggests her knowledge of her social and political power.
Photographs may glorify or denigrate murder or revive.
DeLillo, in one of his interviews, expresses that a writer cannot "separate himself
from the crowd … It is indispensable to be fully involved in contemporary life, to
be part of the … clash of voices"(De Pietro 221). So the inability to be somehow
independent is a universal problem in the heart of simulacrum.
The magical role of the image-supported leader is outstanding in the leader of
Moonies in Yankee Stadium mass wedding ceremony, and it shows the depth of
his charisma in people‟s view:
He wears a white silk robe and a high crown figured with stylized
irises. They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like
Chains of matter that determine who they are. This is a man of
chunky build who saw Jesus on a mountainside. He spent nine years
praying and wept so long and hard his tears formed puddles and
xlix
soaked through the floor and dripped into the room below and
filtered through the foundation of the house into the earth. The
couples know there are things he must leave unsaid, words whose
planetary impact no one could bear. He is the messianic secret,
ordinary-looking. When the communists sent him to a labor comp
the other inmates knew who he was because they'd dreamed about
him before he got there. He has away half his food but never grew
weak. He worked seventh. (Mao II 7)
The author loses his identity as an individual to the fame of his novels. He
becomes famous through his narrative. So Bill Gray, becomes Bill Gray through
his photograph, he becomes his icon, his work.
l
Chapter IV
Welcome to Ground Zero: It’s real!
What happened in America as an attack upon the center of capitalist power
makes a great ground for writers like DeLillo to examine his hand at writing about
this exaggerated event. In doing so, he is obsessed with the American society he
lives in. For him the narrative of people is the main focus of attention. Lots of
other writers tried to write about this event, famous authors like Philip Roth and
John Updike, who wrote striking novels, but DeLillo‟s novels like Libra, Mao II,
White Noise, and Underworld, are served as a series of apocalyptic novels that
result in Falling Man.
In this respect, DeLillo theorizes the role of the writer in depicting 9122,
considering a way the society is being affected from the horror of it. Generally
speaking, DeLillo is the man who enjoys writing about people and their evolution
in the American postmodern society.
What is the future of the split narrative in the presence of this postmodern
condition? How can DeLillo find an answer for the literary facet of the disaster?
What is the significance of the protagonist being encountered with terror? How‟s it
possible for the postmodern character to solve social problems in the wake of
newly flourished terrorism? How‟s it possible for Keith and Lianne as an alienated
li
couple to come through their living contradictions in the American amorphous
society?
Just like what happened in Mao II, in Falling Man also, the thematic and
theoretical records of Baudrillard are of great importance. His opinion about the
loss of origin and reality is finding the stolen origin is the center of the character‟s
search. Seeing things "differently" is part of the counter-narrative DeLillo
establishes, and opposed to most literary depictions of the 9122, he works to see
into the moments of terror surrounding the event itself. While Falling Man begins
with Keith Neudecker walking through the ruins, it ends with the remarkable
moment of impact.
According to Baudrillard, the event itself disrupted and frustrated our predictable
notions of horror. The protagonists are enmeshed because of Baudrillardian
concept of simulacra. Because of Simulacra it is not possible to find the reality.
The reality becomes a copy of reality which has been lost. So we have nothing but
the lack of origin. The 9122 comes to be known as a simulacrum, its origin is
unknown and inexpressible because the genuine source is not available. In such a
complex situation our response and reaction is weird and unpredictable. The
protagonists are diseased when their true self is lost. Here begins their quest of
initiation, the quest to find their long lost center. For DeLillo the anxiety is finding
the new place of literature and artistic career in the terror-stricken American
society. Postmodernism pursues the devastating or flourishing effect of war and
terror on literature and the art of narration.
lii
His Falling Man opens:
It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling
ash and near night. He was walking north through the rubble and
mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces
or jackets over their heads (4)
The moment of destabilization and deconstruction begins here. This is the
meaning of minimalism. We are in nowhere and everywhere. The setting is not
original. Maybe it is the mind of Keith, its famous protagonist. It isn't a street
anymore. It has been altered into a world, a world of ash and rubble and darkness,
smoke and blood.
DeLillo‟s version of story-telling is not straight. He prefers to entangle himself
through lots of indirect descriptions about meager happenings in the lives of the
characters. He chose to create an alternative in order to go straight through the
heart of matter. He is always in the habit of seeing things from another hidden
angle in the form of counter-narrative by which he is able to capture the most
terrifying moments of terror. This is the beginning of the protagonist‟s struggle to
cope with the postmodern condition.
The novel begins with Keith Neudecker striving through the ruins, staggering in
the atmosphere of death and distress. So he entirely engaged in the moment of
terror. His situation is altered after the attacks and goes through a sustained search
to find his position in the middle of abnormality.
liii
Falling Man, like Mao II, focuses on a moment in the lives of its main characters
that is representative of their struggle to find themselves. The main characters in
Falling Man attempt to move back, to go to the moment of regression. The actions
and events in Falling Man all are based on regression as both Keith and Lianne
attempt to cope with the events of the September 22. The novel is full of emotions
depicted as Keith and Lianne become squashed by the change that takes place
within their lives. The breathing space around them changes after the attacks, and
their actions are provoked by an effort to create the normal life.
The problem of time is evident here as DeLillo writes in his article “In the Ruins
of the Future” that:
We seemed pressed for time, all of us Time is scarcer now. There is

a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and
distorted (DeLillo 49)
Time is affected from the horror of the 9122. A gap has been created through the
lives of people. The normal way of living has been disturbed and petrified. Time
becomes postmodern as a series of distorted and disconnected areas of counting
the quantity of life.
In the presence of the moment of impact, Keith and Lianne stop progressing as
independent identities and attempts to regress to the state of “normalcy”. They are
changing the attitude in order to find a moment of "normalcy”, they want to be a
couple once more. Then we observe the condition of an indeterminate state, as
liv
they return to living together. Lianne‟s mother, Nina notes that the return to the
normalcy is very problematic because they still pretend to be somehow separated:
What have you discussed? she said … There's nothing to discuss

right now. He needs to stay away from things, including
discussions" (9).
…What‟s next? Don't you ask yourself? Not only next month.
Years to come
Nothing is next. There is no next. This is next. Eight years ago they
planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what's next. This
was next. The time to be afraid is when there's no reason to be
afraid. Too late now (21)
As it can be easily stated and understood, there is a kind of parody in the dialogue.
Their connection is a sort of imitation. For example, DeLillo says that they don‟t
have any physical relationship and try not to be involved in a sentimental
connection but still Lianne “likes having him … next to her "(28). They are
playing the role of husband and wife because it is what they knew before the
confusion of the towers. While her mother, Nina, is conscious about the future,
Lianne is moving backwards into a space of security.
Keith and Lianne try to imitate their long lost married life. The collapse of the
towers tries to lead them to the moment of their normal life. The horror of the
attack makes them to come back to the time of the past. Keith tries to be a father
and a husband and Lianne is determined to regress to a more comfortable refuge.
They understand that their lives before the attacks were so pointless and
lv
amorphous. As a result their consciousness becomes sensitive toward finding what
has been lost and stolen.
Moving backward in Falling Man is intrinsically associated with each
protagonist's reshaping of identity and use of some special behaviors, as we can
see them frequently as usual actions among DeLillo‟s protagonists. These actions
are rituals. The exercise of ritual can also be seen as a reaction to the change of
attitude, a reaction to the alteration of the way of life, the loss of "normal" space.
Keith and Lianne fight with the fact that the attacks put them disjoined and out of
order as Keith described it as an entrapment in a "dead" space (338).This altered
dead space results in a bitter postmodern bewilderment for the couple. When this
dead space forced them to try to be a real husband and wife again, they are still
determined to regress to their pat normal space. So we have both continuation and
regression. Lianne‟s attempt to cope with this regression is evident in her journey
to find her true self. She wants to know the reason of this disaster. Her
participation in a series of rituals shows her depth of anxiety to regress to the state
of normalcy.
While engaging in rituals, Lianne begins to meet and care for a group of people
who suffer from Alzheimer and tries to be with them in a weekly writing session.
They miserable condition reminds her of her dead father, Jack, who took his life in
order to escape from Alzheimer. His suicide forces Lianne to regress to the time of
his living which reminds her of her past condition through the novel. Her father‟s
lvi
dreadful death causes great distress about her mother‟s constant mental decline.
Here, Lianne begins the exercise of reading the death notices:
She read newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed.
Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of
responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to;
out of some need she did not try to interpret. (217).
She begins a new kind of ritual of counting backwards from 211 to 27 to test her
memory, as her fear of the Alzheimer. This ritual comes to relieve her. This kind
of exercise is obsessed her mind. She is obsessive about her mental health:
It made her feel good, the counting down, and she did it sometimes
in the day‟s familiar drift, walking down a street, riding in a taxi. It
was her form of lyric verse, subjectivity and unrhymed, a little
songlike but with a rigor, a tradition of fixed order, only backwards,
to test the presence of another kind of reversal, which a doctor nicely
named retrogenesis (DeLillo 288)
Professionally, DeLillo follows one of the suspects of American Flight 22,
Hammad, as he progresses towards the attacks. It is DeLillo's attempt to render the
moment of impact in words. The exact description shows the importance of the
dead space in the context of the novel, the significance of the moment of collision
as the plane breaks into the towers:
lvii
A bottle fell of the counter in the gallery, on the other side of the
aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty,
making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it
spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before
the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast
wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of
his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall. He
didn't drop the telephone until he hit the wall. The floor began to
slide beneath him and he lost his balance and eased along the wall to
the floor (349).
We can see the power of DeLillo's depiction of the event in terms of seeing and
feeling it. What DeLillo shows us is the sense of pure terror straight from the
source of terror. His is skillful to express two different perspectives, those of
Hammad and Keith. His view is that of a camera that tries to record the real
moment of clash. His outstanding style of photographic narrative shows the
important place of images in eyes of the reader. DeLillo‟s simple style is broken
because of the cinematic trend of expression. The grand narrative has been slashed
into series of counter-narrative which is the ultimate goal of the author who has to
abandon the traditional way of writing in order to find the precise emotional
moment.
In Falling Man, DeLillo tries to keep his characters out of any social and political
environment. The only characters that refer to this larger political milieu are the
children, Keith and Lianne's son Justin and his friends "the Siblings". They
lviii
murmur the name of Bill Lawton which is an appropriation of Bin Laden. They
mention their historical awareness:
That scares the hell out of me, God, there's something so awful about
that. Damn kids with their goddam twisted powers of imagination
(73)
Don DeLillo, obviously, is interested in keeping his characters secluded. Keith is
not a man of sympathy. He doesn‟t understand the suffering of people after the
attack. The only person Keith can connect with after the attack is Florence, the
owner of the briefcase he unconsciously carried out of the towers. Their
connection is important when they become familiar with each other in the moment
of terror. Her lost briefcase is the source of connection and familiarity.
The point of view in the novel is not constant and ultimate but it differs from a
character to another. It is a technical treatment of language in order to create some
different possibilities of interpretations and over interpretations. DeLillo does his
best to make the reader able to play an important role in the process of
interpretation. He tries to give a different definition for the horror of the event.
The act of interpretation is central to the novel. Actually, one of the most probing
angles of the novel is that of an artist, David Janiak, a performance artist, a player,
who interprets Richard Drew's notorious photograph of a man jumping from the
WTC. It makes one of the main characters totally distresses in the process of
definition. Lianne watches Janiak, attached to a harness and simply hang, "one leg
bent up, arms at his sides"( 44). This spectacle is very painful. He tries to define the
lix
terror of falling man. This image absorbs huge gathering crowds and provokes
rage and fear. It is important to note that the image of the jumpers is already at
hand in DeLillo's mind. The image of falling man is the main theme in the novel.
In his essay, He writes:
People falling from the towers hand in hand. This is a part of the
counter-narrative, hands and spirits joining, human beauty in the
crush of meshed steel (49).
The image of falling man is the reminder of the event. The menacing role of the
image is beautifully shown through Janiack‟s brave act of visual embodiment.
Baudrillardian theory of visual embodiment is evident here. This shows the
excessive power of media. Janiack knows everything about the impact of media on
people‟s collective unconsciousness. He wants to interpret the meaning of
trepidation. His artistic performance tries to show his eagerness to be engaged in
the event once again. He doesn‟t want to forget the event by decreasing the speed
of the falling and make its immediacy more available to the people.
Falling man, in the body of David Janiack, unsettles the situation and brings the
event to a pure singularity. He injures the heart of society. When people want to
forget the terror and fear, the image of falling man puts the normalcy out of joint.
The disturbed space is the result of this spectacular picture.
The meticulous power of the falling man is his propinquity. From the newspaper
articles Lianne reads about the performer, we understand that Janiak kept this
position for some time, usually until police arrested him. Witnessing him for the
lx
second time, Lianne occupies the space closest to him. DeLillo writes, "But the
worst of it was the stillness itself and her nearness to the man, her position. Her,
with no one closer to him than she was"(278). Just as Drew‟s infamous
photograph, the performance depends on the observer:
He remained motionless, with the train still running in a blur in her

mind and echoing deluge of sound falling about him, blood rushing
to his head, away from hers (278).
Here, the condition becomes destabilized. The time becomes out of joint.
Something is rotten in the United States of America! The images of the towers and
dismembered bodies are masquerading in Lianne‟s mind until she finds herself
running haphazardly through the street.
The problem here is to label Keith and Lianne as postmodern figure. The most
important factor in deciding whether or not Keith is a postmodern protagonist is
how he deals with the postmodern disorder in the novel. These diseases, especially
in the sense of Baudrillard's idea of simulacra, which are so prominent in Mao II,
are also present in Falling Man, and Keith deals with them differently than earlier
DeLillo protagonists. Unlike Lianne who is immured in rituals, her husband, Keith
does not fight back the simulacra in the novel; he resigns himself to them. He tries
to digest the concept of simulacra. For example he questions the legitimacy of a
waterfall, an existential question:
lxi
He stared at the waterfall, forty yards away. He realized he didn't
know whether it was real or simulated. The flow was unruffled
and the sound of falling water might easily be a digital effect like
the water fall itself (314-5).
… Did you ever look at the waterfall? Are you able to convince
yourself you're looking at water, real water, and not some special
effect? I don't think about it. It's not something we're supposed to
think a bout, Terry said (315).
… Keith looked into the waterfall. This was better than closing his
eyes. If he closed his eyes, he'd see something (DeLillo 316).
This interesting paragraph shows Keith‟s resignation from reality. He prefers to
live within dead space and enjoy a fake waterfall than continue to exist in the
perplexity of the normalcy. Every possible reality is a great masquerading version
of simulacrum in his eyes. Once again, the space of hyperreality absorbs the
character. For him nothing is genuine. It‟s the consequence of the lack of origin.
The value of waterfall is its falsification.
On the contrary, Lianne has all possible characteristics of an archetypal DeLillo
protagonist, as she is the one in the novel who is struggling to digest the attacks
and even with the major paradigm of simulacra in the book, David Janiak, the
performance artist who revives the image of a man falling from one of the towers.
While Keith makes himself confident from the waterfall, Lianne is shocked by her
encounter with David Janiak, Just as she was scared by the towers' crumple.
lxii
In observing the incongruity between Keith and Lianne it is vital to examine how
each character relates to space and time in the novel, as many critics argue that
modernism focuses on the movement of time, the passage of time, and
postmodernism focuses on changes in space, from moment of turbulence to the
moment of normalcy. So this space will be the inborn disparity between
modernism and postmodernism. For postmodernism, the space in the life of
protagonist is important because
Lianne and Keith are overwhelmed by discrepancies in space and time in the
novel. Lianne's narrative sections disclose the only references to the time within
the novel. Keith is related to space, as he separates himself from time and the
world:
It was Keith … who was going slow, easing inward. He used to

want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw
motion. Now he finds himself drifting in to spells of reflection,
thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing
what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and in to
some dime space that bears his collected experience. (77).
This shows the depth of their dependence on the postmodern difference in time
and space that adds legality to the idea of Keith as a postmodern protagonist.
The question of religion is essential here. It is the confrontation of religion with
terrorism. In Falling Man, terrorism has not only affected religion, but it has
entered into every aspect of American life; although terrorism is becoming a great
lxiii
ideological inclination in most of DeLillo‟s novels, we witness the acme of this
inclination in Falling Man, as terrorism has entered into the mental routine of the
American people. In Falling Man people are incessantly questioning terrorism's
impact. They want to know everything about it, they want to define it and express
their anxiety and horror. The members of Lianne's Alzheimer's disease group
cannot stop writing about their experiences. They can not help expressing their
interpretations. Lianne‟s mother, Nina, and her lover, Martin, cannot live but
discussing over the possible discrepancy between American and European
interpretation of terrorism.
Categorically speaking, Falling Man is a psychological and existential
novel about an earthquake in the lives of American and even worldly citizens.
They want to know their catastrophic situation in the presence of terrorism that has
no originality and referent.
While sense of terrorism in Mao II is discernible by a confrontation of
authorship and social and political authority, in Falling Man this confrontation
becomes more overwhelming as it is determined to critique America and Europe
pressure on culture in the rest of the world. The American and European culture
has been largely criticized over the matter of terrorism. It is the direct product of
their meddling role in the world affairs. DeLillo claims that this "western
influence" is the equal result of widespread and meddling western technology.
American technological society has become:
lxiv
Our fate, our truth. It is what we mean when we call ourselves the
only superpower on the planet. The materials and methods we devise
make it possible for us to claim our future. We don't have to depend
on God or the prophets or other astonishments. We are the
astonishment(DeLillo 49).
The problem is the annoying penetration of American technology and
spectacle to different parts of the world, to those people that abhor America and its
culture as DeLillo puts it; the terrorists "want what they used to have before the
waves of western influence" ( 48); they want what they had before the American
commercialism and consumerism started to penetrate into their tranquility and
originality. The role of America as cultural and technological antagonist and
trespasser is evident in DeLillo‟s novel after the 9122:
We have fallen back in time and space. It is their technology that

marks our moment, the small lethal devices, the remote-control
detonators they fashion out of radios, or the larger technology they
borrow from us, passenger jets that become manned missiles ( 48).
"Bill Lawton", "Ernst Hechinger", and "David Janiak" are the important names in
DeLillo‟s confrontation with terrorism. They are the names of different chapters of
the novel. Here comes the involvement of the Middle East (as the name Bill
Lawton is actually a mispronunciation of Bin Laden). The process of narration
begins in the Middle East and moves into Europe with Martin, the ex-terrorist and
lxv
finally concludes with David Janiak, the American spectacular performance artist
known as "falling man", a distressed jumper.
At this point, DeLillo is fully aware of accusing the western countries of terrorism.
Martin, a European art dealer, is revealed to be an ex-terrorist; she comes to the
conclusion that "maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, which meant
godless, western, white" (296). Lianne haunting and self-conscious confession
shows the depth of Western murderous role in establishing the ground of
terrorism. The characteristics of terrorism are the characteristics of the western
culture.
David Janiak, in recreation of the notorious falling man, is constructing a form of
particularly American terrorism, the image of horror-stricken society, a form of
simulacra. Now both America and Europe are the main suspects of terrorism,
situation in which the representatives of both cultures are involved in this crime in
Falling Man, as both Martin and David Janiak become the agents of terrorism.
Some parts of the novel express Hammad's outlook about terrorism. His ideas
connect terrorism to the American society in that Hammad's concerns, misgivings,
and feelings, are similar to other American people. His fear is expressed through
narrative. During Hammad's first narrative section, he is involved in a love affair
with a woman in his vicinity. This love affair causes him some uncertainties over
his participation in the act of terrorism:
They ate falafel wrapped in pita and sometimes he

wanted to marry her and have babies but this was only
lxvi
in the minutes after he left her flat, feeling live a
footballer running across the field after scoring a goal,
all-world, his arms flung wide (83).
DeLillo writes "In the Ruins of the Future", that:
We are rich, privileged, and strong, but they are willing to die. This
is the edge they have, the fire of aggrieved belief … The terrorist,
planted in a Florida town, pushing his supermarket cart, nodding to
his neighbor, lives in a far narrower format. This is his edge, his
strength. Plots reduce the world. He builds a plot around his anger
and our indifference. (45)
Here, DeLillo expresses the needs and sentiments of Hammad as a citizen with
similar feelings like those of Keith and Lianne; Hammad is not presented as cold
and monstrous. But he wants to be different like terrorists. He, like Lianne, wants
to change the space. So he goes to the planes. For his the change of space is to kill
and to be killed.
The American mentality altered in the presence of terrorism. It becomes a new
form of American puzzle. This puzzle is less about the political side of the attack
than its existential side. After September 22 the American mindset has forever
been altered. It is this postmodern change in space that causes misunderstanding in
the novel. The search in Falling Man is marked by the desire to return to normal
space. Lianne spends much of the novel trying to come to terms with the attacks;
she reads obituaries, and watches and reads the continuous news coverage of the
lxvii
attack. She develops rituals to help her but is finally unable to regain a sense of
normalcy. She wants to know her new existential position.
DeLillo‟s portrayal of Hammad in Falling Man is like his other characters. He
plays on the idea of reinterpretation. Every character has his or her expression of
the attacks, different kinds of definitions, just as DeLillo writes in his essay:
"when the second tower fell, my heart fell with is" ( 47). As an alternative, DeLillo
sees the 9122 as an event that could allow us to reconstruct our conception and
interpretation of the world, particularly in relation to time and space. This event
serves as a good chance to survey the historical and political affairs in America
and other Western countries. The response and reaction of people to this disaster is
a response to the Western way of thought. Culture is being put under great
scrutiny, from artists and parents to the suspected terrorists. Falling Man is a kind
of diminishing and scrambling. It is the diminishing life of man.
The cover of DeLillo's colossal novel Underworld (2997) appears to be a prophecy
of the 9122. The prophecy of America is an obvious proof of the lost reality. The
society of commercialism and capitalism is doomed to failure. The picture of
proudly built Twin Towers is foggy in the cover of Underworld. DeLillo has been
accused of being an accomplice because he had predicted the most painful aspect
of American life. He puts a modest church in front of these buildings that shows
the masterful combination of religion and commercialism.
Underworld begins: "He speaks in your voice American, and there's a shine in his
eye that's halfway hopeful”. This is the voice of prediction and trepidation. Falling
lxviii
Man develops like a phoenix through the ashes of this horrible prediction. In this
juxtaposition, DeLillo‟s voice becomes that of menacing prophet who bells the
end of American capitalism.
DeLillo's typical writings are simple and direct, full of dialogues and linguistic
tension. He works so calculating through the novel and through this mechanism he
shows the most upsetting aspects of terrorized society to the reader. The most
important aspect of the protagonists is pictured through their attempt to create a
new world of normalcy in the middle of wrecked society which has been largely
injured from the loss of meaning. The picture of terrorist is depicted through
organic shrapnel. This kind of expression shows the pieces of exploded shells
situated and absorbed in the body of victims. It is a metaphor of human
connectedness and the inevitable fate of the individual absorbed in the crowd.
Through his novels, DeLillo shows his characters to cope with their intricate
position of lost originality. They want to remodel a meaningful world in the “ruins
of the future”. The proof is the private experience of the characters in Falling
Man. They try to enjoy their little and insignificant society. The example is Keith
when he immured himself in small rituals, such as the wrist extensions to cure an
injury he suffered during his escape from the towers:
He found these sessions restorative, four times a day, the wrist

extensions, the ulnar deviations. These were the true counter
measures to the damage he'd suffered in the tower, in the
lxix
descending chaos. […] His injury was slight but it wasn't the torn
cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the
levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices chocking in smoke.
(51)
All of these activities and private experiences are masquerading as series of hard
attempts to impose a meaningful system upon their lives. As it is skillfully shown
in the mentioned paragraph, Keith as a solid and shapeless character does his best
to alleviate his awful situation.
The same private experience happens when he no longer takes pleasure from wrist
extensions. Like Lianne, her husband wants to resign himself to another relieving
activity like poker. He wants to find pleasure in another meaningful system:
The memory mattered, but not so much. The game mattered, the
touch of felt beneath the hands, the way the dealer burnt one card,
dealt the next. He wasn‟t playing for the money. He was playing
for the chips (338).
He finds nothing but apparent reality and relief in playing poker. Any possible
sense of history or meaning is lost and absence, nothing remains but a dead space:
These were the times when there was nothing outside, any flash of
history or memory that he might unknowingly summon in the
routine run of the cards (336).
History as an all-encompassing father of man loses its place and position. This is
the direct result of the attack that put the American history out of order. Grand
lxx
narratives no longer serve writers as an ultimate solution. So DeLillo has to create
some counter narratives through them his characters are able to deal with the
event.
The picture of Keith and Lianne and their anxious attempt to come to terms with
the attack is the root of the novel. They are determined to analyze their present
condition. In this respect, all characters, even Nina and Martin, comment on
political, cultural, and religious crises in America. The self-conscious confessions
are found in Falling Man that shows the characters awareness about American
endless faults that have brought the doom of the country. Now America is going to
be the true source of anger and terror, a society without center. It is Martin‟s
prophecy:
We‟re all sick of America and Americans. The subject nauseates

us. … For all the careless power of this country, let me say this,
for all the danger it makes in the world, America is going to
become irrelevant. … Soon the day is coming when nobody has to
think about America except for the danger it brings. It is loosing
the center. It becomes the center of its own shit. This is the only
center it occupies (29).
According to him, America‟s future humiliation is the only outcome of its
capitalism and consumerism. It is the opinion of an ex-agent of terrorism. The
American citizens are portrayed as rootless beings who are victims of the political
and ideological faults. They are constructed as outsiders and strangers. The real
source of terror is America itself.
lxxi
The most interesting facet of Falling Man is the religious opinion coming to the
surface. After a disaster in which God is absolutely not involved, some characters
complaint that God has not been fair to them; however, they presume that this is
not the case. It seems to me that this shows the potentials of the characters to go
through searching their forgotten religious backgrounds.
The best answer to the problem of narration is the catastrophic side of the
9122. American people never imagined the attack upon their safe country. Every
day we witness lots of crimes and massacres around the world. But this event,
according to American mindset, is very postmodern. It is unique and singular, it
shouldn‟t have happened! So this kind of thinking is very selfish and menacing. Its
direct assault on American consciousness changed the mentality of all those proud
Americans that used to worship their countries incessant range of power. The only
possible device to restore their normal space before this anxiety is creating a
system of counter narrative. Through narrating their stories, the protagonists find
the meaning of relish and comfort.
Baudrillard remarks that reality is a principle that is lost. Similarly, for
Zizek the reality that settles into cultural consciousness in the aftermath of terrible
trauma is of a different nature to that which preceded it and which formulated our
sense of identity and understanding of the world. He observes that "the real which
returns has the status of another semblance: precisely because it is real, that is, on
account of its excessively traumatic character, we are unable to integrate into it our
lxxii
reality, and are therefore compelled to experience it as a nightmarish
apparition"(Zizek 5).
One of the interesting aspects of Falling Man is the case of Muslims living in the
American society. DeLillo shows some inclinations toward associating Muslims
and monolithic Islam with terrorism. The only western non-Muslim in the novel to
show sympathy to Muslims is himself a terrorist. In Falling Man, DeLillo
effectively associates a monolithic Islam with terrorism. DeLilo despite his
postmodernism has some ideas close to that of Samuel Huntington in “The Clash
of Civilization” published in 2994. According to him, the main source of conflict
in the world is primarily “cultural”. The great civilizations have been altered into
lots of new civilizations. The conflict is focused on cultural and national affairs.
The growing resistance to the project of globalization and western dominance
results in an all-out war between cultural borders. One of the most striking points
in this article is the antagonism toward Islam. It is depicted as a source of war and
bloodshed. Huntington even called the Islamic borders “bloody”. In Falling Man,
DeLillo is eager to show “Fundamentalism” as a threat and so called Islam is
nothing more than a version of fundamentalism that is a threat as shown in the
character of Hammad, the imaginary terrorist, who wants to present his hatred
toward western culture. Falling Man is a very Orientalist text. The picture of Islam
is always associated with bloody and ruthless terrorism.
lxxiii
Chapter V
Conclusion: Redemption or Regression?
The death of the author in the charisma of the image has long been the field
of interest in Don DeLillo. He puts Roland Barthes‟s „‟death of the author” into
practice. Bill Gray actual death at the end of Mao II shows the ultimate authorial
diminished status in the presence of spectacle. The novel foretells the crush of
authorial talent as it shows the overwhelming power of image-makers.
Author‟s creative writing has been threatened by the appearance of terrorism; Mao
II is determined to depict the fight of power between visual and actual. The
writer‟s unique ability to conquer the heart of people and to impress their
consciousness is diminishing in the age of media. The reality is lost and killed by
force of image-makers and simulacrum. The crisis of identity is central as a
thematic concentration as we witness Bill Gray lost individuality and identity in
front of Brita‟s camera:
I‟ve become someone‟s material, Yours, Brita. There‟s life and

there‟s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel
our lives toward some final reality in print or film. …Everything
seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nature has
given way to aura. All the material in every life is channeled into the
glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently.
Twice over or once removed (54-55).
lxxiv
DeLillo‟s scrupulous engagement with Baudrillardian idea of the simulacrum is
evident here. The image is the murderer of personality. Bill Gray has been
identified and killed through his photographic image. Brita is the agent of society
who is able to materialize the subjugation of author to the image. This means the
destruction of authorial identity in the presence of simulacrum which puts the
personality out of origin and out of center.
DeLillo‟s mindset is totally affected by the horror of terror-stricken society in
which all boundaries are impressed through creative force of Terrorism. The
society is the slaughterhouse of reality and identity. Bill Gray quest to define
himself results in his disappearance and, at the same time, his fame at its height.
In his piece “In the Ruins of the Future,” published in December 3112, DeLillo
expressed his fear over the expression of the event:
The whole play of history and power is disrupted by this event, but
so, too, are the conditions of analysis. You have to take your time.
While events were stagnating, you had to anticipate and move more
quickly than they did. But when they speed up this much, you have
to move more slowly- though without allowing yourself to be buried
beneath a welter of words, or the gathering clouds of war, and
preserving intact the unforgettable incandescence of the images
(DeLillo 5).
lxxv
The whole historical background has been assaulted by this accident. Although
Bill Gray the writer becomes famous by his captured image, the terrorist is the
winner of the competition between him and the authorial force.
According to DeLillo, the struggle between the writer and the terrorist is the
struggle to conquer the ideological ground in the society. Terrorist through
creating a series of catastrophes expresses his anxieties and wants people to be
parts of it. His anger and uprising is a bitter reaction to all technological and
commercial systems of American and European seemingly progressive thought.
Years ago, it was the eternal and exclusive duty of writers like Bill whose words
were magical. Now this magic is gone. The new force of magic is the terrorist. He
wants to be in charge of reality. He wants to make “raids on human
consciousness”. The confrontation of novelist and terrorist is the crux of Mao II.
In Falling Man, this confrontation changes into an existential problem between a
terrifying attack and terrified American society in which Keith is a representative.
As mentioned and suggested before, all of these problems and crises can be
perceived through chasing the counter narratives. Counter narrative consists of the
stories of New York City on the day of and days after the attack. The different
points of view help the author to express the inexpressible trauma of the 9122.
Grand narratives with their predictable process of narration and conclusion are of
no use here because it is not supposed to be a traditional response at the end of
postmodern novels of DeLillo.
lxxvi
Though Mao II, the narrator is constantly under the spell of terrorists. He, through
counter narrative, tries to free himself from the charm of terrorism but he falls into
another trap and it is that of spectacle. The story of Bill Gray and his journey to
the eastern countries and his meaningless death is a counter narrative by means of
it the author does his best to create a logical world of narration and shows people‟s
anxiety in the heart of simulacrum.
The story of Keith and Lianne Neudecker, Nina and Martin, and even Hammad, is
a series of small narratives that deserve being scrutinized and examined. Although
they are ordinary American citizens, their lives and relationships either as couples
or as terrorists is striking and significant. In the absence of grand narrative, the
source of counter narrative is the peripheral lives of people.
DeLillo uses strategic counter narrative in Falling Man by putting an estranged
couple and an ex-terrorist in the center of debate. The story of Keith and Lianne, is
the counter narrative, which stands as a crux of matter in the novel. Falling Man
demonstrates the power struggle between the society and the terrorist. What we
see in David Janiack artistic performance is a clear evident of such struggle. He
wants to revive the moment of terror through artistic creation. He expresses his
fear through creating counter narrative.
The competition between word and image, terror and art happens in Falling Man,
just like Mao II. In this respect, DeLillo determines to revive the power of
language and words and to restore the linguistic charm in order to recover the
control of society. This is exactly visible in Lianne‟s attempt to create counter
lxxvii
narrative in those writing sessions. DeLillo‟s simple but charming style of writing
depicts another sort of coping with the society of terror:
They wrote about the planes. They wrote about where they were
when it happened. They wrote about the people they knew who were
in the towers, or nearby, and they wrote about God. …No one wrote
a word about the terrorists (71).
Words and language are the instruments of the novelists that make people ready to
find their lost reality, the tools which Baudrillard views them in contrast to the
visual images maneuvered by the terrorists on September 22. Novelists like
DeLillo enjoy trying their hands in manipulating the words to betray the images.
The existential tension in Keith‟s consciousness is perceived through his
previously mentioned alternatives of playing poker and wrist extensions. Even
Hammad‟s peripheral life in American society and his live affairs with an
American woman is another sign of counter narrative that DeLillo had to shape in
order to reimburse the lack of grand narrative that has lost its credit and
authenticity. The 9122 is perceived by DeLillo as force that exerts power on the
American consciousness. America comes to term with the attack through revising
the hidden cultural structures of the society.
DeLillo once again fluctuates between two themes of actual reality and visual
fantasy. In one sense, He stresses the importance of word expression in the form of
novelistic career, and from a different perspective, the splendor of image and
artistic simulation which is visible in Janiack‟s shocking representation of the
lxxviii
horror of falling man. Bill Gray‟s photographic image completes his authorial
fame because it makes him visible through propaganda. The image even identifies
him to the terrorists are aggressive toward Brita‟s cinematic career. The image is
both alleviating and menacing: Brita wanted to know more about terrorism when
she took off the hood from a terrorist‟s head. But the New Yorkers found falling
man dangling from the skyscraper ghastly and terrorizing which reinterprets the
attack in their media-receptive minds.
Here, the falling man is usually seen dangling from one of the city‟s skyscrapers:
A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a
business suit, one leg bent up, and arms at his sides. A safety harness
was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg
and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct (44).
As a real and recorded fact, the falling man is a real victim of the attack who really
jumped from one of the towers on September 22. The aesthetic side of the event is
mirrored through David Janiack performance. Art and mass media are confronted
in this strain. Janiack‟s action is very tormenting in the eyes of the New Yorkers
for whom he performs: He reminds them of:
those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were
forced to jump … the single falling figure that trails a collective
dread, body come down among us all( 96).
The other side of Don DeLillo‟s Mao II and Falling Man is the Herculean task of
search to find the true self. They struggle against the postmodern ailments that
lxxix
have affected the American culture. In Mao II terrorism is shown as an
impediment in the search for self. In Falling Man the main obstacle is the concept
of simulacrum. People live in the world of fantasy. Even their perception and
definition from their environment is based on the society of spectacle in which
they live. The loss of reality is a pure postmodern element. Because of the
postmodern elements in these novels, especially a loss of origin owing to what
Baudrillard terms “simulacra”, each of the protagonists from these novels,
somehow becomes intricate in the process of finding a new sense of reality.
Through Falling Man, The characters are in a course of regression. They choose to
cope with their present way of life. Keith and Lianne were living separated before
the collapse. After the event they come to their consciousness. Keith decided to
change his dead space into the condition of normalcy. This kind of regression is
actively present in the novel. Keith is involved in an amorous affair with Florence.
He tries to review the course of his life through other aspects. The blast causes a
tremor in his life as a citizen. He comes to know himself. He wants to be a
husband once again, however; both Keith and his wife have some difficulties to
come back to their happy days.
Their mindset is ready and equipped to digest the catastrophic side of their life.
This inclination is visible in their ritualistic activities. They try to find their long
lost identity. Keith is happy when he plays poker, not for money, but for its
assuaging atmosphere. Karen is calm and logical when she counts down or
participates in Alzheimer writing sessions. As I stated before, rituals replace the
lxxx
normal way of life that has been lost in the presence of simulacrum. They spend
their time talking about religious tensions and contradictions. The existence of
God and his involvement in the attacks are the new titles that had never been
discussed before.
Definitely, each of these novels ends without even the possibility of any success.
They just want to be involved and engaged. Maybe DeLillo only wanted to show
the possibility for characters to express their desires. They have the chance to
distinguish reality and simulation. The example is the case of waterfall. The
concept of waterfall is real, but Keith‟s perception and definition of it is based on
image and the loss of reality. This makes the journey of self-discovery very hard
and piercing and even without any hope of reaching it.
That these novels all end with painful postmodern regression does not weaken the
importance of the search for self; what DeLillo is attempting to show is how the
struggle in these novels is diagnostic of the struggle of everyday life.
The events of the world have been changed. The residue of such condition is the
birth of counter narrative. The postmodern change of space is the direct result of
war and terrorism, capitalism and commercialism, consumerism and mass
production. The cruel system of capitalism prepares a ground for creating a set of
objects as citizens. The famous commercial brands captivate American and
European people who are the humble slaves of the system of mass production.
Mao II represents DeLillo‟s wholly developed exploration of terrorism and social
spectacle. The novel breaks new ground in its exploration of the dilemmas of the
lxxxi
artist in postmodern culture. Mao II is without doubt the novel of consciousness;
Bill Gray‟s words are that of a prophet who wants to warn, and give special
meaning to the events of September 22. He laments the demise of the novel in the
face of the society of spectacle, with its media-driven, postmodern heroism.
DeLillo‟s novel argues for art‟s continuing gift to change social consciousness.
Baudrillard, usually seen as an exemplary postmodern theorist, has embraced
something remarkably analogous to a modernist aesthetic of estrangement. He is
always fond of sudden sense of recognition.
DeLillo‟s characters in Mao II live an amorphous world where the source of
power has been stolen from the identity and individuality and the image
overcomes, where the terrorist narrative established the stream of images and
information in a media-saturated world. The role of information is significant. Bill
Gray the author complains that “we‟re giving way to terror, to news of terror, to
tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster
is the only narrative people need” as it stated before.
For Gray, terrorism is related to a media-saturated culture in which informational
events replace the space of reality, in which the grand narratives by which people
live are hyperreal. Grand narratives are shown in the face of simulacrum.
Terrorist‟s act is staged for the media and becomes part of the hyperreal condition.
In Mao II, the artistic career tries to fight the realm of hyperreal in terrorism.
Bill Gray has some modernist inclination toward the society he lives in. He
pursues a heroic mission in which he is doomed to be creative through his
lxxxii
authorial career. For Gray, writing is “a chronicle of gas pains and skipped
heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath” (Mao II 246).
According to him, this task faces some difficulties in the presence of terror and
spectacle. But the new inevitable postmodern world doesn‟t‟ let him to complete
his mission. In this world, one can not be a recluse. The power of image pushes
him toward a desentered society in which finding a meaning if not entirely
possible. DeLillo‟s exploration of the “new culture, the system of world terror”
leaves us with a flow of images and information in which disembodied signs move
internationally and become their own referent.
This society becomes a center for a cruel indifference toward identity and
independence, where ideological and political distinctions are combined under the
sign of commodity and spectacle. The cult of image creates an illusion through
which people enjoy believing in a constructed and manipulated reality. The
disappearance of the event in information, the disappearance of values and
ideologies in the global dissemination of signs, this is the Baudrillardian condition
that DeLillo describes in Mao II. In hyperreal, culture announces the death of real
reality. The autonomy of artistic creation and modernist quest to find the real
meaning is under the assault of spectacle. The example is the successful recreation
of falling man through David Janiack‟s daring performance that began to absorb
more spectators than Bill Gray‟s revised and rewritten novel. The powerful
position of image in people‟s idea serves as an obituary to modernist alienated
creation.
lxxxiii
The Postmodern process of narrative creation is not supremely present in
DeLillo‟s mind; his style of narration is believed to be that of a fathomless
postmodern novelist, though. Simulation plays with American life, nourishes the
American psyche, deteriorates the identities, and reshapes them through the trend
of image-making. The author can be survived through the image-makers. He
becomes Bill Gray not through living in his basement but through being killed and
being created through the visual perception. The image-culture with its immediacy
has made the crowd-rather than the individual-the defining unit of contemporary
culture. For Bill Gray, the narrative of terror is both destructive and redemptive.
The redemption will be achieved through his invisibility in his life and his fame in
his death.
The hyperreal makes demarcation in arrogant American society where all
corporeal and spiritual affairs are plagued by lack of palpable reality. This
becomes apparent upon the perception of Twin Towers ignited. The response to
this event is sensational. Keith is forced to trace lost codes of love in his estranged
mutual life, his razed parental role, and his social persona as a citizen of simulacra.
The horror of inevitable postmodern condition depicts equivalent reaction of
ignorance and knowledge. DeLillo‟s protagonists wander in their insignificant
lives, but terror unearths their unconsciousness. Collapsed American dream forces
them to search their stolen real existence.
The death of the author has been changed from virtual into actual. Although
DeLillo‟s characters are stigmatized as postmodern, their very modern quest
lxxxiv
cannot be neglected. Even some traditional techniques of narration can be traced
through his attempted novels. The element of knowledge comes to the surface
when we see Keith‟s committed search to find himself, not quite fruitful though.
The redemption takes place through a process of regression. In the case of love
affair and citizenship, Keith‟s inclination toward Florence, the woman to whom he
becomes familiar in burning towers is a sort of regression that causes mental
redemption. Lianne‟s considerable enthusiasm to know more about her
surroundings and even about her mother, Nina, and her suspicious lover, Martin,
leads her to reread and reshape her ideological and existential perceptions from the
world.
As a result, the postmodern world of simulacrum and pastiche prevents the author
like Bill Gray to be a modernist passenger through the passage of time. The
apparent success of a citizen like Keith or even Hammad depends on their total
surrender to the media-saturated society of spectacle. So redemption is a far-
fetched word. Finding the meaning of life and self is not possible in the presence
of terror and violence. Terrorism answers the loss of reality with anger and blood.
What happened in Ground Zero was a reaction to arrogant and elevated, yet
destructing power of capitalism. That‟s why DeLillo neglects the image of Twin
Towers as non-existent at the back-cover of his novel, Falling Man.
The era of terrorism is interesting for further studies especially in the realm of
orientalism. Mao II can be analyzed in light of Edward Said‟s orientalism.
lxxxv
WORKS CONSULTED
Baudrillard, Jean. Simularca and Simulation, trans, Sheila Glaser, Michigan: university
of Michigan press, 2996.
---, The spirit of Terrorism, trans, Chris Turner. London: verso, 3114.
Boxall, David, Don DeLillo: The physics of language. Georgia: university of Geargia,
3114.
Cowart, Peter. Don DeLillo: The possibility of Fiction. New York: Routledge, 3117.
DeLillo, Don. “I don‟t know America anymore.” By christoph Amend and Georg Diez.
Die Zeit, 22 Oct 3117.
DeLillo, Don, Falling Man: A Novel. New York, Sribner, 3118.
--- Mao II: A Novel. London, Viking, 2993.
---, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of
September”. Harper‟s Magazine. Dec. 3112: 44-51.
Dewey, Joseph. Beyond Grief And Nothing: a Reading of Don DeLillo. USA: university
of South Carolina press, 3117.
DePietro, Thomas, Conversation with Don DeLillo. United States of America: University
Press of Mississipi, 3116.
lxxxvi
De Zengotita, Thomas, “The Numbering of the American Mind: culture as anesthetic”.
Apr. 3113 (http; // harpers. org/ archive/ 311311511179245.)
Duval, John. N The Cambridge companion to Don DeLillo. UK, Cambridge university
press, 3118.
Ebbesen, Jeffery; Postmodern and its others: the fiction of Ismael Reed, Kathy Acker,
and Don DeLillo. New York: Routledge, 3117.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: an Introduction. 4rd ed. Oxford, UK, Blackwell
publishing, 3118.
---, The Illusions of postmodernism, Oxford, UK, Blackwell publishing,
2997.
Lane, Richard. J, Jean Baudrillard. New York: Routledge, 3119.
Leitch, Vincent. B, The Norton Anthology of Theory & criticism. New York; Norton,
3112.
Lentricchia, Frank, Introducing Don DeLillo, Durham: Duke University press, 2992.
Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology, Oxford, UK; Blackwell
publishing, 3113.
lxxxvii
---, Postmodern Literary theory: An Introduction, Oxford, UK, Blackwell
publishing, 2997.
Lyotard, Jean- Francois. The postmodern condition; a Report on Knowledge, USA:
university of Minnesota press, 2985.
Osteen, Mark. American magic and dread: Don DeLillo‟s conversation with culture ,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 3111.
Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Oxford, UK,
Blackwell publishing, 3116.
Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of Real. London: Verso, 3113.
lxxxviii
‫‪lxxxix‬‬

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‫‪Allameh Tabataba’i University‬‬

‫‪Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages‬‬

‫‪A Study of Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Falling Man‬‬

‫‪A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements‬‬

‫‪Advisor: Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi‬‬

‫‪Reader: Dr. Kamran Ahmadgoli‬‬

‫‪By: Somayeh Salehi‬‬

‫‪The Most Merciful,‬‬

‫‪The Most Beneficent‬‬

‫‪A Study of Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Falling Man‬‬

‫‪A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements‬‬

‫‪Advisor: Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi‬‬

‫‪Reader: Dr. Kamran Ahmadgoli‬‬

‫‪By: Somayeh Salehi‬‬

We Hereby Recommend That the Thesis by

A Study of Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Falling Man

Be Accepted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Committee on Final Examination

………………… Advisor: Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi

………………… Reader: Dr. Kamran Ahmadgoli

………………… Examiner: Dr. Behzad Ghaderi

………………… Head of the Department: Dr. Zia Tajeddin

‫نویسنذه‪ /‬هحقق‪ :‬سویِ صالحی‬

‫واشه ناهه‪ً :‬ذارد‬ ‫کتابناهه‪ :‬دارد‬

‫وارتردی ‪‬‬ ‫تَسؼِ ای ‪‬‬ ‫تٌیادی ‪‬‬ ‫نوع پایاى ناهه‪:‬‬

‫سال تحصیلی‪9831 :‬‬ ‫هقطع تحصیلی‪ :‬وارشٌاسی ارشذ‬

‫گروه آهوزشی‪ :‬زتاى ٍ ادتیات اًگلیسی‬ ‫تعذاد صفحات‪ 19 :‬صفحِ‬

‫کلیذ واشه ها به فارسی‪:‬‬

‫‪ -8‬هٌغمِ صفر‬ ‫‪ -9‬آخرالسهاى‬

‫کلیذ واشه ها به انگلیسی‪:‬‬

‫‪9- Apocalypse‬‬ ‫‪8- Ground Zero‬‬

‫‪2- Fuzzy Logic‬‬ ‫‪4- Postmodernism‬‬

‫شاّذ پیشرفت ٍ ػمة گرد ّستین؟‬

‫فاًتسی اعراف خَد وٌار تیایٌذ‪.‬‬

‫ث‪ .‬نتیجه گیری و پیشنهبدات‪:‬‬

‫هی تَاًذ تر رٍی ایي دٍ داستاى اًجام شَد‪.‬‬

‫نبم استبد راهنوب‪ :‬دوتر سیذ هحوذ هرًذی‬

‫‪To the Elysian soul of‬‬

‫‪The Lord of Martyrs‬‬

‫‪Imam Hussein Bin Ali‬‬

I would like to thank Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi for

This thesis project determines to show the postmodern elements of thought

stricken generation of American society and incredible escalation of postmodern

diffuses as an author who can draw a horrific picture of traumatic situation of

ingredients of post 9/22 that are embedded in postmodern life of DeLillo's

characters in his mentioned novels. Through an organic yet ubiquitous

methodological survey, I will depict my questions of postmodern anxiety and

question of regressive or redemptive aspect of disaster will be shown in this thesis.

scrutinized. In the absence of reality and originality, every perceived reality is a

hyper-reality that has been accepted as a real reality.

‫‪Definition of key terms………………………………...…. ....22‬‬

‫‪CHAPTER II: DeLillo, a true postmodern?..........................22‬‬

‫‪CHAPTER III: Moa II: Art & Terror Revisited…..……....53‬‬

‫‪CHAPTER IV: Falling Man:‬‬

consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated" (DeLillo

Donald DeLillo is one of the most controversial writers of America who

has won a distinguished place among postmodern thinkers. Although he always

postmodern authorship in which authors employ visual and electronic media to

postmodern ethics. DeLillo used to show it through mass media, photographic

through scrutinizing linguistic elements. We can see both postmodern inclination

toward "no expression" and modernist tendency of Joyce toward aestheticism.

impossibility to represent reality. DeLillo's novelistic idea is an interwoven story

of communism, capitalism, American identity- making and the horror of mass