Cultural Trauma in DeLillo’s Falling Man

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man concentrates on the 9/11 catastrophe with its grand historical background, complex language, changing spaces and complicated narrative structure. This article tries to put Falling Man under the perspective of trauma and examine Don DeLillo’s exploration of the cultural trauma, the relations between the Western world and the Islamic world. In the novel, DeLillo uses individual trauma to represent the cultural trauma experienced by the nation as a whole. In the meantime, DeLillo juxtaposes two cultures in the novel by narrating from two perspectives to show the long-standing misunderstanding and conflict between two different cultures and discusses the possibility of dialogue between them.