Don DeLillo's Falling Man and the Protective Shield against Stimuli

In “Open Doors, Closed Minds,” Richard Gray writes, “new events generate new forms of consciousness requiring new structures of ideology and the imagination to assimilate and express them” (2009, p. 133). So, for example, we may expect novelists to represent unprecedented social events with unprecedented narrative structures. Yet Gray argues that this expectation has been generally disappointed by novels about 9/11 and its aftermath. He asks “just how new, or at least different, the structures of these books are,” and in answer he replies, “for the most part, not at all” (p. 133). If we accept the terms of his analysis, then an absence of new formal techniques in 9/11 fiction must mean that the attacks did not generate “new forms of consciousness.” I will read Don DeLillo's Falling Man with an eye to understanding why the latter never emerged.

This novel represents the nature of protagonist Keith Neudecker's consciousness both before and after he escapes the strike on the World Trade Center. To give a sense of what I mean by the nature of his consciousness, consider the scene in which Keith returns to his apartment several days after the attacks. Everything there “remained the same as it had been when he walked out the door for work that Tuesday morning. Not that he'd noticed. He'd lived here for a year and a half … content with the narrowest of purviews, that of not noticing. But now he looked” (2007, p. 26).1 These few lines explicitly represent Keith's consciousness even if they convey no meaning or explanation of the form it takes. He lived in his apartment for a year and a half without ever noticing it, but the disruptive effect of 9/11 prompts him actually to look at it. In doing so, he discovers that the apartment contains nothing much worth looking at to begin with, and this discovery reinforces a tendency to disregard his environment. To be sure, this fact