Everyone has a 9/11 story.
Where were you on 9/11? What were you doing? When did you hear the news? Did you stop and watch the T.V. screen? Did you tune into the radio? Did you ask your neighbors? Did you look up to the clear blue September sky? Did you listen for airplanes? What were you feeling under that heavy weight of silence?
For some, their lives ended on 9/11. And for some, life went on. People moved on. The date changed. Soon after that, the headlines changed. And New York worked to rebuild itself.
Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, follows the lives of those Americans who were forced to pick themselves up from the rubble and move on: Keith, his estranged wife Lianne, their son Justin and their friends and family. At first, for me, this book was hard to get into. It’s disjointed and disorienting. It switches through time and space. It’s erratic. It’s surreal. It’s dreamlike. It’s walking through someone else’s dream.
I didn't understand it. I didn't feel like I could relate to it. All of the characters and their experiences seemed so far-off and inaccessible to me. Then it hit me at chapter five of part one (p.71-73):
Where were you on 9/11? What were you doing? When did you hear the news? Did you stop and watch the T.V. screen? Did you tune into the radio? Did you ask your neighbors? Did you look up to the clear blue September sky? Did you listen for airplanes? What were you feeling under that heavy weight of silence?
For some, their lives ended on 9/11. And for some, life went on. People moved on. The date changed. Soon after that, the headlines changed. And New York worked to rebuild itself.
Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, follows the lives of those Americans who were forced to pick themselves up from the rubble and move on: Keith, his estranged wife Lianne, their son Justin and their friends and family. At first, for me, this book was hard to get into. It’s disjointed and disorienting. It switches through time and space. It’s erratic. It’s surreal. It’s dreamlike. It’s walking through someone else’s dream.
I didn't understand it. I didn't feel like I could relate to it. All of the characters and their experiences seemed so far-off and inaccessible to me. Then it hit me at chapter five of part one (p.71-73):
"He takes the binoculars over to the Siblings'. Any idea why?"
"They're searching the skies."
"For what?"
"Planes. One of them, I think it was the girl."
...
"Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?"
"Just once. He wasn't supposed to tell anyone."
"They're searching the skies."
"For what?"
"Planes. One of them, I think it was the girl."
...
"Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?"
"Just once. He wasn't supposed to tell anyone."
"What was he hearing?"
"He was hearing Bill Lawton. They were saying Bin Laden."
"He was hearing Bill Lawton. They were saying Bin Laden."
"The kid slipped. He let the name slip. He told me the planes were a secret. I'm not supposed to tell anyone the three of them are up there on the twenty-seventh floor."
It took the kids in this book to bring into a vague sense of understanding for me. We talked about it in class on Tuesday: that the novel, in its disjunctive structure is only imitating the mentality of a nation under attack. Its hard to make sense of an act so tragically senseless. Especially for young minds.
And it rings true through all Americans. All of us, metaphorically, had to pick ourselves up from the rubble and move on. When I read that passage, I thought of myself nine years ago: I was eleven years old. Entering the sixth grade. School closed. The atmosphere in my neighborhood was oddly silent. No planes overhead. My mom was fixated on the television screen and we
watched it together in the semi-darkness of the basement: those stark, grim images. I've heard that we've been dubbed the 9/11 Generation. Funny to think that our lives could be defined by that one day. Sitting there on the couch, none of it made sense to eleven-year-old me. I'm twenty years old and I still don't have all the answers. Probably, not much more than the questions that I started out with.
It took the kids in this book to bring into a vague sense of understanding for me. We talked about it in class on Tuesday: that the novel, in its disjunctive structure is only imitating the mentality of a nation under attack. Its hard to make sense of an act so tragically senseless. Especially for young minds.
And it rings true through all Americans. All of us, metaphorically, had to pick ourselves up from the rubble and move on. When I read that passage, I thought of myself nine years ago: I was eleven years old. Entering the sixth grade. School closed. The atmosphere in my neighborhood was oddly silent. No planes overhead. My mom was fixated on the television screen and we
watched it together in the semi-darkness of the basement: those stark, grim images. I've heard that we've been dubbed the 9/11 Generation. Funny to think that our lives could be defined by that one day. Sitting there on the couch, none of it made sense to eleven-year-old me. I'm twenty years old and I still don't have all the answers. Probably, not much more than the questions that I started out with. And that is what DeLillo is trying to do is not so much provide us answers, but relate to us through our unanswered questions.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003215,00.html
"And that is what DeLillo is trying to do is not so much provide us answers, but relate to us through our unanswered questions."
ReplyDeleteYeah, I really agree with this statement. That is exactly what Delillo is trying to do--to relate to us. That Falling Man is a fiction work, it allows for us to be actually plugged into the situation of people that have very relatable thoughts and actions. I was watching on the television at school, sitting cross-legged on the floor amongst a huddle of 30 confused kids. Why was class stopped? What are the twin towers? The WTC? What is going on? To me, I was young, it seemed very distant. It wasn't happening here, to me, and I knew nobody closely that lived in New York. In fact, I have still never been to New York. Yeah, it was terrible, but I didn't understand it. With Falling Man, I feel like I now have a better understanding of what it meant to be in New York at that time--even if it is in a very different sense than what Rose's portrayal of New Orleans post-Katrina has to offer.