Contesting the Story?: Plotting the Terrorist in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man

The work of Don DeLillo has frequently focused its attention on terrorism, and therefore the cameo role of Hammad, an imaginatively created member of the terrorist group who carried out the attack on the World Trade Center, is unsurprising in his post-9/11 novel Falling Man (2007). The intrinsic interplay of fact and fiction that frequently characterises post-9/11 novels and situates them within hegemonic discursive frameworks has fostered a debate about the role of literature in documenting such events and its relevance to understandings of significant historical moments. Within such contexts conventional readings of DeLillo’s novel focus on the success or failure of his depiction of the American protagonist, Keith Neudecker, who survives the attack on the World Trade Centre. My reading argues that contingent on Keith’s orthodox American perspective; a modernist privileging of narration remains stylistically prominent and seeks to affirm a Western discourse. Yet, through the play of temporality, the text also interweaves a counter-claim to this hegemony through the construction of Hammad’s plotting. While situating the fictional text within a dialogical relation to an actual and implied international rhetoric, DeLillo offers a faltering humanising of the terrorist that complicates popular understandings of terrorism. The inclusion of Hammad in an otherwise constrained personal sphere of experience implicates its specificity within a global political narrative.