Abstract
Don DeLillo’s December 2001 Harper’s Magazine essay, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” presages his 2007 novel, Falling Man, whose title echoes the predicament of victims who jumped from the World Trade Center. Both texts grapple with the personal and public aftereffects of September 11 as the day recedes further in time. Specifically, these texts delineate the fissures that comprise the cultural trauma of September 11 by elaborating World Trade Center survivors’ compromised subjectivity and agency, witnesses’ ambivalent identifications with the plight of those who jumped from the towers, questions about choice and fate, and doubts about whether the aftermath of September 11 will ever reach any form of resolution.
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Muller, C. (2017). Limning the “Howling Space” of September 11 Through Don DeLillo’s Falling Man . In: September 11, 2001 as a Cultural Trauma. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50155-0_3
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