The falling man analysis
- Falling man characters
- Keith is a lawyer who was working at the World Trade Center when it collapsed, managing to wander away through the wreckage, until he comes upon a truck passing.
- Keith Neudecker, a lawyer in his late 30s who worked in the North Tower, walks in an ash-covered daze towards the place “where he'd been going all along.”.
- •
Bill Lawton by Any Other Name: Language Games and Terror in Falling Man
“Language is inseparable from the world that provokes it”
-- Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future”
The attacks of 9/11 generated a public discourse of suspicion, with Osama bin Laden occupying the role of the quintessential “most wanted” for nearly a decade, before being captured and killed in May 2011. In the novel, Falling Man (DeLillo), set shortly after the attacks of September 11, Justin, the protagonist’s son, and his friends, the two Siblings, spend much of their time at the window of the Siblings’ New York apartment, “searching the skies for Bill Lawton” (74). Mishearing bin Laden’s name on the news, Robert, the younger of the Siblings, has “never adjusted his original sense of what he was hearing” (73), and so the “myth of Bill Lawton” (74) is created.
In this paper, I draw on postclassical, cognitive narratology to “defamiliarise” processes undertaken by both narrator and reader (P
- •
Book Summary and Reviews of Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Media Reviews
"Starred Review. The writing has the intricacy and purpose of a wiring diagram. The mores of the after-the-event are represented with no cutenesssave, perhaps, the falling man performance artist." - PW.
" In the past, DeLillo has been a notably chilly writer, clinical rather than compassionate toward his characters, more interested in what he wants them to stand for than who they are. Here he's obviously trying to invest them with more human qualities, and he gets points for the effort, but he can't pull it off. The only emotions in this novel come from outside, from pictures on television, and that's not good enough." - The Washington Post.
"Starred Review. [I]t's a testament to DeLillo's brilliant command of language that readers will feel once again, whether they want to or not, as scared and as sad as they felt that day." - Booklist.
"If Underworld took its cues from the kinetic cinema of Eisenstein, Falling Man, up until its remarkable final sequence, is all oblique silences and enigm
- •
Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.
These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.
Written by Shahd Alshogran and other people who wish to remain anonymous
Falling Man is a novel that shows the aftermath of the terrible event that happened on 9/11/01.
The protagonist, Keith Neudecker, is presented in the opening scene of the novel. Keith is a lawyer who was working at the World Trade Center when it collapsed, managing to wander away through the wreckage, until he comes upon a truck passing by. The truck driver helps to bring him to an apartment with his ex-wife Lianne and his young son Justin. Keith and Lianne had broken up a while ago, so Keith moved to another apartment, giving him the ability to walk to work every day.
After the tragedy of what has happened, Keith starts to seek the comforts of home again. He starts seeing Lianne again, and they restart their relationship. Although things seem like they were before, they aren't emotiona
Copyright ©oakvibe.pages.dev 2025