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Lauren Rossi
Major: English
April 22, 2011
A Decade of Reflection: A Cultural Analysis of 9/11 in Television and Literature
The other children and I are sitting in a class room. It is seventh grade math class and the
teacher is lecturing. My book is open, but I am looking out the windows at the clear day, a waste
because I am in school, just a few weeks after the end of summer vacation. The door to the room
is thrown open and a woman enters, crying. It‟s our eccentric principal, who is practically
screaming for our teacher to turn on the T.V. A city that I‟ve never been to appears on the screen.
Apropos of nothing, a plane flies into a building. The principal is still crying and somewhere in
her manic clutter of words the class comes to understand that New York City has been attacked,
specifically some buildings known as the World Trade Center. This is not fiction. This was my
9/11 experience.
My memory of 9/11 is just one among millions, each of which is significant because they
are part of the history of the event. The small recollection I included above is the largest piece of
what I remember – the rest is just fragments, mirror shards reflecting only a part of the story. As
a child, I barely understood the implications of the terrorist attack; I didn‟t even know that this
was not the first time Americans had been the target of a terrorist plot. The world was changing
around me and I did not perceive it until I was a few years older and realized that 9/11 was a real
game-changer and that America would never be the same. Nearly ten years passed, along with
two wars, a 9/11 commission report and an endless pursuit for the infamous Osama bin Laden.
During this time I also decided that I would choose the literature of September Eleventh as my
topic for my Honors research project. I wanted to learn more about the event, listen to the
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perspectives of those who lived through it and, most of all, gain a comprehensive understanding
of how the fall of the iconic World Trade Center forever changed American identity.
Perhaps ironically, the World Trade Center has become a more potent symbol of
America after the destruction of the Twin Towers than it had ever been. In pop culture, the image
of the towers has become as ubiquitous as the mushroom cloud in the 1950‟s and 1960‟s, acting
as a harbinger of the trials to come in the new world order of the 21 st century. A prime example
of this trend is the film Watchmen, which chronicles the evolution of a group of superheroes in a
dystopian 1985 where Nixon has been president for five terms. The towers come into play during
the burial of one of the superheroes. Ominously looming in the background of the scene is a
computer generated recreation of the World Trade Center. While the camera shifted between the
American flag draped on the coffin and the gray-on-gray stripes of the Twin Towers on the New
York skyline, I thought about how the image was representative of America‟s challenges yet to
come. Within the film, the image is symbolic of the end of an era and the new chapter in
American superheroes. One may apply this concept to the real world after 9/11 when everyday
Americans were called upon to be vigilant and help stop terrorist plots; a memorable example is
the May 2010 attempted bombing in Times Square, in which a T -shirt vendor and Vietnam
veteran reported the suspicious van to police. When asked if he had any advice for his fellow
New Yorkers, Lance Orton simply responded, “See something, say something,” offering what
has now become a global slogan against terrorist plots (Schmidt, “T-Shirt Vendor ;” Fernandez,
“A Phrase for Safety”).
In addition to symbolizing America‟s coming obstacles, the towers are now also included
in the canon of horror fiction. Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan‟s novel The Strain is the
first book in a three-part series that imagines a vampire plague consuming New York City and
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ultimately the world. About halfway through the novel, the reader learns that the excavated
Ground Zero site that “existed like a gouge in the city” is where the newborn vampires spend
their days (Del Toro, Hogan 327). The presence of the vampires is indicated by the swarm of rats
that abandon the tunnels and sewers near Ground Zero and the pest exterminator, Vasiliy Fet,
must enter the tunnel to determine the cause. Underneath the site of the former towers, Vasiliy
notices a “fine powdery dust still coating the walls of the original tunnel” (Del Toro, Hogan
408). The authors did not arbitrarily choose such an emotional setting for their villain, the
vampire “Master” Sardu, who thrives on “tragedy and pain” (Del Toro, Hogan 534).
Furthermore, although Del Toro and Hogan reimagine Ground Zero as the hub of evil, they pay
all due respect to the “hallowed place, still very much a graveyard…Where bodies and buildings
were pulverized, reduced to atoms” (408). Coincidentally, both The Strain and Watchmen were
released in 2009 and were very successful. Within the scope of this project, I examine how
Ground Zero has become a kind of pilgrimage, especially those who were not anywhere near
New York at the time of the attacks, and how the simple empty space is both stark reminder and
understated memorial.
However, neither of these works were the prompt for my exploration of 9/11 in culture.
Research began when I was a freshman at the University of Akron and I wrote a paper on a short
story titled “Newsworld II,” by Todd James Pierce. The story concerns a group of high school
boys from Georgia and their way of coping with the terrorist attacks. For the emotionally
confused youths, this becomes quite the challenge as they experience anger, sadness and
disbelief. In an attempt to understand what happened on 9/11, one night the boys break into
Newsworld, a local amusement park. The historical theme park, with its attractions that recreate
various milestones in American history from the sinking of the Titanic to the Los Angeles police
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chase of O.J. Simpson, is an emblem of their fading youth. The object of the boys‟ trespassing is
the San Francisco Earthquake exhibit, which they believe will resemble the disaster in New York
City after the collapse of the buildings. The young men hope that seeing the fabricated
destruction will help them “feel something other than the vague ache [they had] felt all week,”
acting as a medium that closes the gap between Georgia and New York City, as well as the gap
between their adolescence and impending adulthood (Pierce 199).
The next cultural product I chose for my paper was a television show I had been watching
with my family called Rescue Me. Denis Leary created the show and also plays the main
character, Tommy Gavin, a New York City firefighter. Rescue Me comes from a completely
different angle than Pierce‟s short story because the story focuses on the firefighters who directly
experienced 9/11 and whose emotional shortcomings are far more serious than a juvenile lack of
understanding. In addition to following Tommy Gavin, the series has side plots that concern the
other firefighters like Tommy‟s best friend and the firehouse lieutenant, Kenny Shea, and the
Chief, Jerry Reilly. Although the story takes place three years after the terrorist attacks, Tommy
frequently returns to the subject of 9/11 through dreams and hallucinations, amidst the major plot
lines of his relationships with his wife and other women. Tommy, like America, was forever
changed by his experience in the World Trade Center. The six seasons that have run thus far (the
seventh one will be released in the summer of 2011) follow the downward spiral of Tommy‟s life
as he fails as a husband, father and friend, and his dependence on alcohol and drugs. The
audience is put on rollercoaster ride of the protagonist‟s highs and lows; at times, it seems as
though Tommy has overcome his fears and his anger. However, each time it seems as though
Tommy hits rock bottom, he digs even deeper to a new low. As a whole, Rescue Me is blatant,
direct and uncompromising when addressing 9/11; there are no code words or elegant metaphors,
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but rather portraits of average men dealing with the obstacles of life in a post-9/11 New York
City. In contrast with the high school students in “Newsworld II,” the firefighters on Rescue Me
were the closest to the disaster and were not allowed to run away from it like the civilians, or to
turn off the T.V. when it became too graphic.
Next, I selected a novel titled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Saffran
Foer, which I had read for a book club. The novel is mainly told from the point of view of nineyear-old Oskar, whose father died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. A year after his father‟s
death, Oskar finds a small envelope simply labeled “Black” in his father‟s closet. Thus begins
the child‟s quest to learn about his father‟s identity that will lead him throughout the five
boroughs of New York as he interviews each of the people with the last name Black. In addition
to Oskar‟s narration are letters written by his grandparents; his grandfather‟s letters to Oskar‟s
father and his grandmother‟s letters directed to Oskar himself. His grandfather‟s letters, dating
back to the 1960‟s describe the loss of his pregnant girlfriend, Anna, in the bombings of Dresden
during WWII and his marriage to Anna‟s sister – the grandmother of Oskar. The letters elucidate
the old man‟s inability to overcome his grief over the loss of his lover and child, the guilt he feels
at abandoning his wife and unborn child, and why he came back to his former home in New
York City after 9/11.
In contrast, the grandmother‟s letters, always titled “MY FEELINGS,” to Oskar
demonstrate how she has managed to reconcile her own grief from Dresden, as well as the loss of
her son in the terrorist attacks, instructing her grandson in her final letter of the novel that “It‟s
always necessary” to tell people in his life that he loves them (Foer 314). Ultimately, Foer‟s
novel is a love letter written to New York City that captures the reverence of its citizens toward
9/11. It is significant that Foer places a child at the center of his novel about an event that even
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adults were ill-equipped to interpret; everything is new to the nine-year-old Oskar, just like 9/11
was a new experience for most Americans who had never considered the possibility of a terrorist
attack.
Whereas Foer‟s novel is a testament to the possibility of healing after a tragedy,
DeLillo‟s novel casts a dark, uncertain outlook on America‟s future after 9/11. The plot is
centered on Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who worked in the World Trade Center who survives the
attack, his wife, Lianne, from whom he is separated, and their son, Justin. In addition to the
alternating perspectives and experiences of Keith and Lianne are chapters told from the point of
view of the 9/11 plane hijackers who directed their aircrafts into the twin towers. Whereas
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close offers a perspective of post-9/11 New York City that
shows people sharing the burden of a traumatic experience, Falling Man warns how people can
be just as easily torn apart by aftershocks of such an event. DeLillo incorporates the sensation of
detachment through the infidelity of his protagonist, Keith, and Justin‟s reluctance to
communicate with his parents after 9/11.
The title of DeLillo‟s work comes from the haunting photograph of one of the people
who jumped from the windows of the World Trade Center, setting the tone of despair and
alienation for the novel. Furthermore, DeLillo assigns each of the three parts of his narrative with
a title that has a deeper meaning. Part one is titled “Bill Lawton,” which is Keith and Lianne‟s
son‟s mispronunciation of Bin Laden; the Americanization of the terrorist mastermind‟s name
lends him a mythical quality as a faceless, omnipresent villain. “Ernst Hechinger” is the title for
part two and refers to the lover of Lianne‟s mother who was a domestic terrorist in Germany.
Last is “David Janiak,” which is the true name of the fictional performance Falling Man that
haunts the city after the attacks.
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I have divided this analysis of 9/11 into three sections that each focus on a pairing of
major themes that are consistent among all of the works. However, the discussion is strictly
limited to the events of 9/11 that occurred at the World Trade Center. The first chapter examines
the topics of death and rituals. I chose death as the first theme because the termination of
thousands of lives in the twin towers is the catalyst for everything that follows. The subject of
ritual accompanies death because the characters in each of the works have developed a means of
coping with their grief and anxiety. The mechanisms they employ become habitual and assume
the import of a ritual that must be done to maintain balance. I titled the second and third sections
Time and Memory and Violence and Reality. The sum of these three groups show the footprint
of 9/11 in our culture and the difficulty people have with adapting the surreal display of terrorism
to quotidian life, as well as the influence of time on how 9/11 is perceived.
DEATH AND RITUALS
It is estimated that 2, 752 people died as a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center
on September 11, 2001. However, it was not until January of 2009 that one of the latest
casualties was added to the list: Leon Bernard Heyward died in October of 2008 as a result of
what the Chief Medical Examiner called “„exposure to World Trade Center dust following [the]
collapse of the World Trade Center‟” (Dunlap, “Sept. 11”). Mr. Heyward‟s death is significant
not only as the loss of a human life, but as solemn proof that 9/11 is an event that America is still
experiencing. It seems as though the magnitude of the disaster is such that it cannot be confined
by the limits of time, but rather transcends them much like a poltergeist would a locked door.
Furthermore, this fluid quality has not been lost on the writers and producers who shape cultural
response to the attacks on the World Trade Center.
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In an essay that draws its name from Falling Man, Lisa K. Perdigao examines how works
like these changed the cultural treatment of death in a variety of genres after 9/11 by concluding
that as they “represent death …. [b]oundaries are crossed and conventions are dismantled”
(“„Everything Now is Measured by After‟” 199). It is no surprise that both Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close and Falling Man are stylistically unconventional. For example, DeLillo rarely
refers to the characters by their names, choosing instead to use generic pronouns such as “he”
and “she” and the dialogue is often without tags to indicate who is speaking. Foer also deviates
from the traditional novel format by having three different narrators and frequently inserting
pictures, blank pages and purposefully unreadable text throughout the story. The end result of the
techniques of both authors is the confusion and broken communication that the reader
immediately associates with the chaos of 9/11.
The subjects of death and ritual are two of a host of topics that characterize post-9/11
literary and media work. In Falling Man, Keith Neudecker escapes death in the World Trade
Center, yet the shadows of those who perished are never far and DeLillo represents them in a
variety of ways. One of the ways in which DeLillo portrays death is through ghosts. These are
not spirits that come bearing messages from beyond the grave, but are symbols that evoke
memories of the absent World Trade Center and those who died in the towers. Perdigao clarifies
this by describing Falling Man as a representation of a “postmodern landscape littered with
corpses and haunted by ghosts, yet offering the possibility of recovery, of reanimating the dead”
(200). In an essay that she calls “Postmortem,” Perdigao examines the concept of the “organic
shrapnel” that the doctor speaks of while removing glass from Keith‟s face after his escape from
the World Trade Center (DeLillo 16). The body material of other people that could have been
implanted in Keith‟s skin is an example of a ghost because of the bumps that can appear on the
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victim‟s skin even months after the removal of the shrapnel (DeLillo 16). The organic shrapnel is
indicative of the unification of the living and the dead that is more than a spiritual presence.
To further identify the presence of ghosts in the novel, the essay also cites a quote from
the early part of the novel in which Keith is considering how the “dead were everywhere, in the
air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes carried from the river. They were settled in
ash and drizzled on windows all along streets, in his hair and on his clothes” (DeLillo 25).
Remarkably, Foer expresses the same sentiment in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close when
Oskar and his mother are having an argument about spirituality; he exclaims that his father did
not have a spirit, but that he “had cells, and now they‟re on rooftops, and in the river, and in the
lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak” (169).
Consequently, Foer reinforces the link between those who perished on 9/11 and the living who
continued to walk the streets of New York City. Because the authors use similar language to
describe the casualties at Ground Zero, one might conclude that 9/11 has changed the way we
think about death. The fatalities at the World Trade Center were not something that only
happened to individuals, but something that affected all New Yorkers as a tragedy that they
literally consumed and made a part of themselves. By illustrating how those who died were
biologically absorbed by those who survived, DeLillo and Foer create a physical image to
represent the emotional and conceptual way in which 9/11 has become a part of American
identity. The grotesque image of ingesting the remains of other human beings also seems to
indicate America‟s revulsion toward the gore and violence of the terrorist attack and our new
status as a reluctant victim.
The Falling Man performance artist of DeLillo‟s novel is another ghost that haunts New
York City. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, during which people threw themselves
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out of the windows, the performance artist takes on the connotation of a “single falling figure
that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all,” which eerily mirrors the now
immortal image of the man who jumped from the window (DeLillo 33). Later, after the death of
David Janiak, the true name of the Falling Man, Lianne considers whether his trademark position
was “intended to reflect the body posture of a particular man who was photographed falling from
the north tower of the World Trade Center, headfirst, arms at his sides, one leg bent, a man set
forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower” (DeLillo
221). Lianne also finds an article that debates the public perception of Janiak as “Heartless
Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror” (DeLillo 221). Lianne continues by
examining pictures of him suspended headfirst from structures, and thinks that “he was a falling
angel and his beauty was horrific” (DeLillo 222). Within the novel, Janiak is a shocking
reminder of the public deaths at the World Trade Center, while three years after the novel‟s
publication the scandal of the performance artist of Falling Man now calls attention to the issue
of sensitivity toward 9/11 that is still very much present in the debate concerning the Muslim
center to be built just two blocks from Ground Zero.
The image of someone leaping from the World Trade Center also haunts the young
protagonist in Foer‟s novel. Oskar finds a picture of a falling man on the internet and prints
copies of it for his scrapbook, Stuff that Happened to Me, and arranges them in an order that
shows the man descending, as in a children‟s flipbook. Throughout the novel, the picture of the
falling man appears several times, sometimes randomly, indicating how his mind arbitrarily
summons the graphic image (Foer 97). At the very end of the novel, Oskar tears out the pages of
the falling body and reverses their order so that “it looked like the man was floating up through
the sky” (Foer 325). Oskar then goes on to wish that he could reverse everything his father did so
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that he would be telling him the last bedtime story about a fictional sixth borough of New York
City again. In the final line of the novel, Oskar says “We would‟ve been safe” (Foer 326), and
the novel concludes with 15 pages of pictures of the falling man who is now rising into the sky.
As a result, the conclusion of the novel has a definite hopeful message for a post-9/11 America;
Oskar does not remove the falling man from his scrapbook, but reverses his descent. Similarly,
America cannot expunge the terrorist attack from its history, but we do have control over how
the nation reacts and develops in the years following 9/11.
In addition to discussing death, Foer also provides an accurate emotional portrait of
someone who survived 9/11 by adhering to psychology‟s understanding of post-traumatic stress
and description of trauma. For example, Oskar‟s reimagining of 9/11 and his reversal of the
pictures are consistent with the reactions of real people coping with trauma who “reenact the
traumatic moment with a fantasy of changing the outcome of the dangerous encounter” (Herman
39). Furthermore, Oskar‟s behavior would be described as “hyperarousal” which “reflects the
persistent expectation of danger” because of his constant anticipation of terrorist attacks and
even his own death (Herman 35). Oskar‟s preoccupation with death leads to his creation of what
he calls “inventions” (Foer 36), one of which is demonstrated in the stream-of-consciousness
first chapter:
So what about skyscrapers for dead people that were built down? They could be
underneath the skyscrapers for living people that are built up. You could bury
people one hundred floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the
living one. Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that
moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place. So if you wanted to go to
the ninety-fifth floor, you‟d just press the 95 button and the ninety-fifth floor
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would come to you. Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you‟re on the
ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the
ground, and everyone could be safe … (Foer 3)
Although 9/11 is never explicitly mentioned in the above quotation, Oskar‟s preoccupation with
planes hitting buildings is an obvious reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center and
his father‟s death. The image of a skyscraper appears again much later in the novel when Oskar
hypothesizes that he could die tomorrow because of the suddenness of his father‟s death and says
that “Everything that‟s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke
rises at different speeds, but they‟re all on fire, and we‟re trapped” (Foer 245). Oskar‟s
inventions and theories concerning disasters demonstrate how much 9/11 has affected his
perception of the world and how often he thinks of death and terrorism.
More than Falling Man or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the television series
Rescue Me uses the image of ghosts to characterize life after 9/11. Whereas the novels rarely
specifically mention the disaster, the terrorist attacks are very prominent in Rescue Me, in both
the dialogue and the visuals. For example, 9/11 is the starting point for the first episode, which
begins with Tommy speaking to new recruits for the New York Fire Department across the river
from where the World Trade Center used to be. In response to this image, I thought about how
the absence of the two iconic structures is as imposing and powerful as their former dominance
of the New York skyline. Behind Tommy are four pictures of men from his firehouse who died
at Ground Zero as he lectures the men that there are no “heroes” in the FDNY, but also no
“pussies” allowed (“Guts”).
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Immediately following Tommy‟s speech to the new recruits, his best friend and cousin,
Jimmy, one of the four who died in the World Trade Center, appears to Tommy in his truck and
the audience quickly learns that Tommy is literally followed by ghosts, or at the very least
hallucinations. Ghosts continue to appear to Tommy throughout the first season as he sees the
severed head of another one of his fallen 9/11 colleagues in his locker, another screaming at him
and bursting into flames in the middle of the street where he lives; the ghosts of various people
who die in fires also appear throughout the season. In the final episode of the first season,
Tommy is confronted by all of his ghosts at once during a dangerous fire. He is in such a
powerful state of hallucination that his fellow firefighters cannot get him to leave a burning room
and, as a result, the ceiling collapses on one of his colleagues. The severity of the after-effects of
9/11 are illustrated when Tommy‟s estranged wife, Janet, says she needs to get out of the
neighborhood with the orphans and widows of firemen. Janet notes that the firefighters who
survived 9/11 are “worse than the guys who died that day” because although they pretend that
everything‟s fine they are actually “dead inside” (“Gay”). In a way, Janet is insinuating that
Tommy himself is a ghost that is more dangerous than the benign hallucinations that follow him
because he is still serves a purpose as a husband and a father.
The subject of rituals is another topic that characterizes post-9/11 entertainment in the
way that the protagonists of Falling Man, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Rescue Me
all develop rituals as a means of coping with the trauma of their 9/11 experiences. In DeLillo‟s
novel, the idea of ritual is first introduced in the description of Keith‟s physical therapy exercises
in which he must make a “gentle fist” (40). Long after the injury he sustained while escaping the
World Trade Center has healed, Keith continues to do the wrist therapy as it becomes a way to
cope with his memories of 9/11. Furthermore, Keith‟s poker games with his friends also take on
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a ritualistic quality as he and his friends impose rules on the game that I interpreted as a parallel
to the strictures of Islam that the young 9/11 hijacker, Hammad, struggles to uphold; they only
play a certain kind of poker, drink a specific type of alcohol and exclusively smoke cigars.
However, just as the young terrorist Hammad breaks the rules of Islam by having sex with his
girlfriend, the rules of the poker game are also inevitably broken (DeLillo 100). The ritual of
poker persists for Keith even after he and his friends stop playing as he becomes an occupational
player with “an element of pure ritual in his movements” (DeLillo 198).
In addition to Keith, both Justin and Lianne of Falling Man also adopt habits that they
practice in their daily lives. Justin speaks only in monosyllables and attributes it to “Bill
Lawton,” suggesting that perhaps he too speaks only in monosyllables (DeLillo 101). The
narrator reveals very little about the motivations behind Justin‟s modification of his speech
except to say that it began as an “instructive form of play but the practice carries something else
now, a solemn obstinacy, nearly ritualistic” (DeLillo 160). The same habitual rebellion can be
seen in Justin and his friends‟ continual search for the planes and their belief that the World
Trade Center did not collapse (DeLillo 74, 102). Contrary to Oskar‟s more optimistic
reimagining of 9/11 at the end of Foer‟s novel, Justin believes that the towers are still standing
and consequently remain a target for “Bill Lawton,” who Justin claims has promised another
attack that will bring them down (DeLillo 102).
Lianne‟s ritual takes the form of a mental exercise she does to help retain memory and
stave off dementia in which she counts down from 100 by increments of seven (DeLillo 187).
Lianne has a deep-seated fear that she will lose her memory; when she was twenty-two her father
shot himself in order to stop his dementia from progressing into Alzheimer‟s (DeLillo 40). For
this reason, Lianne frequently does her prayer-like exercise that the narrator describes as a
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“tradition of fixed order” (DeLillo 188). At the end of the novel, Lianne considers beginning
“long-distance running as spiritual effort” (DeLillo 233), and also visits the church of one of the
women from her Alzheimer‟s group where she describes feeling the presence of deceased
people. Rather than feel fear in the presence of death, Lianne feels that it is “a comfort, feeling
their presence, the dead she‟d loved and all the faceless others who‟d filled a thousand churches”
(DeLillo 233).
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close the rituals are chiefly confined to Oskar and his
grandfather. In addition to wearing only white, Oskar‟s quest to find the owner of the key
becomes a kind of ritual - a cause to which he is dedicated and an activity that ultimately allows
him to forgive himself for not answering his father‟s final call. Furthermore, Oskar turns to his
scrapbook Stuff That Happened to Me when he is upset. The pictures inserted in Foer‟s novel
that parallel those in Oskar‟s scrapbook communicate the traumatic narrative of 9/11 in a way
that text cannot. Dr. Herman explains the importance of images to those who have experienced
trauma by explaining that “[t]raumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context; rather they
are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images” (38). Therefore, it is perfectly logical
that Oskar would rely on photographs to cope with his emotional pain and that Foer would
include the photographs in his novel about post-9/11 New York City.
The grandfather also substitutes language with images by becoming a voluntary mute
who communicates via messages written in notebooks and tattoos of “YES” and “NO” on his
palms. In creating characters who are navigating life after 9/11 in a variety of ways, Foer
recognized that “traumatic events…overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life” (Herman
33). Just as Oskar suffers from hyperarousal, the grandfather is afflicted with what Herman calls
“intrusion” (37). Intrusion describes the emotional reaction to tragedy in which “traumatized
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people relive the event as though it were continually recurring in the present. They cannot
resume the normal course of their lives, for the trauma repeatedly interrupts. It is as if time stops
at the moment of trauma” (Herman 37). Foer illustrates this kind of severe traumatization in
Thomas Sr. by showing that he cannot move beyond the bombing and instead resigns to
muteness. As a result, the novel provides an accurate portrayal of people coping with a tragedy
like 9/11.
The rituals practiced by Tommy Gavin and the other men in Rescue Me are very different
from those of the novels as some of them are self-destructive. Masculinity is one of the primary
forms of ritual for the men in 62 truck; they struggle to appear strong, invincible and fearless in
front of one another. For example, Lieutenant Kenny writes poetry about his 9/11 experiences to
help alleviate his pain, yet also he fears that his coworkers will interpret his writing as evidence
of oversensitivity or effeminateness. Similarly, Tommy scoffs with the other men at the
department psychiatrist sent to evaluate how the firefighters are coping after 9/11. However,
Tommy speaks to the woman after the other men leave and he says “„I‟m a New York City
fireman, my whole goddamn life is a gamble‟” (“Guts”). Enforcing their masculinity is a way
that the men attempt to act as though they have not been emotionally or psychologically affected
by 9/11. Adrenaline, which is similar to masculinity in the way that is often involves a public
display, is another way in which Tommy deals with stress. In an episode appropriately titled
“Immortal,” Tommy jumps out of a window while carrying a woman onto a cherry picker,
receiving a mixture of applause from civilians and displeased glares from his fellow firefighters.
In the next episode he makes another dangerous “grab” just to save a dog and later jumps from
one rooftop to another to save a little girl (“Mom”). In order to feel secure in his job and his
masculinity, Tommy does dangerous things, which likely also help him to feel more alive.
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However, even more dangerous than his adrenaline-fueled rescues is his addiction to alcohol;
relapses into alcoholism become a ritual for Tommy each time he experiences something
negative, such as a fight with his wife or agreeing to an affair with his cousin‟s widow. Tommy‟s
use of alcohol as a coping mechanism for his unaddressed issues parallels reality in the way that
“[t]raumatized people who cannot spontaneously dissociate may attempt to produce similar
numbing effects by using alcohol or narcotics” (Herman 44). Tommy does, however, develop a
less destructive ritual when he discovers that if he goes to the church and prays for the ghosts
that follow him he can make them disappear.
Returning to the story of Leon Bernard Hayward who died from inhaling the lethal dust
of the collapsed twin towers, the deaths related to 9/11 are the most compelling reminders of the
terrorist attacks. The ghosts that haunt New York City are not gone, but merely occulted in the
void of Ground Zero and in the hearts and bodies of New Yorkers. As a community, we pay
tribute to the victims in memorial services and in visits to Ground Zero; in many cities there are
stone memorials silently urging all who pass to “Never Forget.” Like “the day that will live in
infamy,” 9/11 is now a part of American legend and although memories may fade with time, it
may also be that the passage of time allows for more perspective and a greater context with
which to analyze the event. The next section, titled Time and Memory, focuses on the
relationship between historical events and their interpretation and categorization in memory.
Although my memory of 9/11 has dulled over the years, many people who were more personally
traumatized by the attacks can provide detailed descriptions of their experience to this day.
Furthermore, the issue of distance – both emotional and geographic – comes into play in this
chapter as I examine the community aspect of 9/11.
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TIME AND MEMORY
Jack Murray believed that September 11, 2001 was his last day on earth. He wasn‟t an
office worker in the World Trade Center, a fireman or a policeman. He was a New Yorker and he
feared that the terrorist attack would spark a nuclear war of apocalyptic proportions. Murray, a
welder, was one of the first to enter Ground Zero and begin cutting through the metal to unearth
survivors. In contrast, Racquel Kelley vividly remembers the moment of the plane‟s impact as
she sat in her office in the Pentagon. Kelley says she is able to relive the experience through her
memory and that she thinks of 9/11 every day in one form or another while she constantly
anticipates another attack. Yet another story is told by John Romanowich, a rescue worker at
Ground Zero, who describes how his arrival at the wreckage felt like an “alternate reality” in
which he had “walked out of the audience and became a part of the show.” Murray, Kelley and
Romanowich‟s stories, along with several others, are available to the public through StoryCorps,
a non-profit organization that chronicles the lives of Americans through interviews. The program
is invaluable as a resource because it has immortalized the 9/11 memories, which might
otherwise have been lost to oblivion, and has made them accessible to those who did not
experience the event first-hand.
Similar to how Oskar‟s memories of 9/11 in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are
symbolized by the skyscrapers and the falling man, as I discussed in the first chapter on Death
and Rituals, DeLillo uses the concept of gravity and its influence on the physical objects that
dominated the visual landscape of 9/11 (paper, people and clothing) to illustrate the figurative
gravity that the historical event has accrued over time. This new gravity is no longer a force on
concrete objects, but on abstract concepts such as world politics, cultural stigmas and fear. Just
as Romanowich called Ground Zero an “alternate reality,” the narrator of Falling Man describes
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the scene as “not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night”
(DeLillo 3). Via the recollections of the characters, the novel illustrates how the altered state of
New York after 9/11 did not subside once the smoke cleared from the metal ruins, but rather
continued in the minds of those who experienced the event. While Keith, the protagonist, is
sedated for a procedure to remove the glass from his skin he relives a memory of 9/11 which the
narrator describes as “a dream, a waking image, whatever it was, Rumsey in the smoke, things
coming down” (DeLillo 22). The fragmented style and errant punctuation of DeLillo‟s novel
helps to demonstrate the effects of trauma by communicating the confusion of memories forged
in chaos that accompanies a traumatic event.
Placing the concepts of memory and 9/11 together calls to mind the slogan “Never
Forget” that was created immediately after the event and subsequently placed on memorials. The
ubiquitous message was a mandate to the American public to keep the memory of 9/11 alive.
Nevertheless, time is continually moving and drawing us further away from the event.
Consequently, it may be that America will one day forget as people move on with their lives and
the population ages. Perhaps the cycle of life and death will generate a new society in which 9/11
has no apparent relevance. The slogan may be inherently flawed because it commands us to do
the impossible; DeLillo‟s novel Falling Man abstractly points this out by juxtaposing the
characters‟ memories of 9/11 with a discussion of Alzheimer‟s disease and dementia that
prevails throughout the novel. The theme of memory loss is concentrated in the character of
Lianne, the wife of Keith and the mother of Justin. The reader learns that Lianne‟s fear of
memory loss is a result of her father, who terminated his life in order to stop the progression
from dementia to Alzheimer‟s. As discussed previously in Death and Rituals, Lianne performs
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an exercise in order to help maintain the integrity of her own memory and she also helms a group
of Alzheimer‟s patients, in which she encourages them to keep journals.
Ten days after 9/11, Lianne asks her Alzheimer‟s patients to write a journal entry about
their 9/11 experiences. In the following chapter, the group‟s various perspectives of 9/11 in terms
of where they were at the time indicate that place is an important part of any monumental event.
Furthermore, DeLillo is pointing out that writing is not only an exercise in memory, but an
opportunity for catharsis. The patients‟ journals also express a wide range of feelings toward
God‟s involvement in 9/11; some believe God has a plan, while others do not and some question
whether there even is a God. While one of the women reads her journal entry about the terrorist
attacks, Lianne describes her mental condition as “not lost so much as falling,” echoing the
concept of gravity the narrator uses to describe 9/11 in the beginning of the novel (DeLillo 94).
Just as important as where people were physically located at the time of a disaster is how
they are grouped after the event. Inevitably, a process of categorization ensues in which there are
eyewitnesses, survivors, conspiracy theorists, war hawks, mourners and hundreds of others. In
the days following the destruction of the World Trade Center in Falling Man, people begin
leaving New York City. Lianne‟s mother makes an indictment against the deserters by saying
“The ones who leave were never here,” indicating that a true New Yorker stays in the city and
shares the fear and the shock with the other people who are trying to cope. Lianne‟s group
therapy discussion along with the denunciation of those who try to distance themselves
physically from Ground Zero shows that in DeLillo‟s novel and in reality, remembering 9/11 is a
communal event.
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Keith‟s adulterous relationship with Florence Givens, a woman whose suitcase he
accidentally carried home on 9/11, continues the theme of the terrorist attacks as an experience
that must be shared. Furthermore, Florence‟s recollection of 9/11 demonstrates the elusive nature
of memories that occur in a time of chaos: “She saw a woman with burnt hair, hair burnt and
smoking, but now she wasn‟t sure she‟d seen this or heard someone say it” (DeLillo 55).
Similarly, her certainty that the way she felt during her long trek down the stairs of the World
Trade Center will always be with her expresses the relationship between time and memory
through Niklas Luhmann‟s concept of “„gaining time‟” (Halas 311). Halas describes the process
as “the ability to turn something which has become outdated back into a live issue by recalling
the past and anticipating the future” (311). The act of “recalling the past” is the sole purpose of
the memory and is emphasized by national events like 9/11 in which the media and society offer
annual tributes, but is personalized in the minds of survivors and family members. The
StoryCorps interview of Dina Lafond, whose daughter worked on the 94th floor of the World
Trade Center and died on 9/11, demonstrates just how indelible the memories of the terrorist
attacks are as she describes the “continuous heartache” she experienced: “When I used to close
my eyes, I would have the two towers, one in each eye, and I could never close my eyes, because
I would see those twin towers and it took me months before that picture went out of my mind.”
Lafond‟s emotional expression of the connection between the passage of time and the image of
the World Trade Center in her memory suggests that perhaps some things need to be forgotten,
thus further contradicting the 9/11 slogan.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close provides another example of gaining time through
Oskar‟s grandfather, whose letters about his experience in the bombing of Dresden indicate how
dependent he is on his past; he cannot escape the loss that he suffered and so he uses the letters to
Rossi 22
his son, which he never sent, as a way of negotiating with trauma. I will elaborate on the letters
from Thomas Sr. and his experience in Dresden later in this chapter. Returning to Falling Man,
however, the notion of “gaining time” provides a context for not only Florence Givens‟ need to
retell her 9/11 experience to Keith multiple times, but to the structure of DeLillo‟s entire novel,
which is divided into three parts that each return to the day of September 11, 2001.
Part two of the novel, titled “Ernst Hechinger,” revisits Keith‟s arrival at Lianne‟s
apartment just after the World Trade Center collapse; he is covered in ash, dirt, blood that is not
his own, and glass shards planted in his face (DeLillo 87, 88). Because so much of the novel
takes place in the aftermath, returning to the actual event sparingly, Falling Man is a novel in
which the attacks of September 11, 2001 are the backstory. As explained by the narrator, “These
are the days after. Everything now is measured by after” (DeLillo 138). In the third section titled
“David Janiak,” Keith is trapped within this “after” life, living in “the days after and now the
years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the
gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness” (DeLillo 230). Keith‟s
unhappiness and struggle to live life in the shadow of phantom towers makes one question if he
is the epitome of someone who “never forgets;” however like Dina Lafond, his mental scars are
an unhealthy influence on his life.
The final chapter titled “In the Hudson Corridor” finally elucidates Keith‟s experience in
the World Trade Center, rather than employing the method of memories used in the rest of the
novel. The chapter begins, however, not with Keith, but with the plane hijackers. DeLillo is
justified in showing the event from the terrorist point of view because “cultural memory of
trauma involves both the perpetrators and the victims” (Halas 316). DeLillo uses the plane‟s
impact in the World Trade Center as a smooth transition from the terrorist perspective of one of
Rossi 23
the hijackers on the aircraft to Keith in his office. Here, the reader witnesses Keith‟s futile
attempt to rescue his friend Rumsey and his glimpse of a body falling past an office window
(DeLillo 242, 243). Just after Keith escapes the building, the south tower collapses and the
narrator remarks “The only light was vestigial now, the light of what comes after, carried in the
residue of smashed matter, in the ash ruins of what was various and human, hovering in the air
above” (DeLillo 246). The last words of the novel describe how Keith “saw a shirt come down
out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life” (DeLillo 246).
Unlike the hopeful conclusion of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in which Oskar‟s
pictures show the falling man rising into the sky, Falling Man is contrastingly pessimistic in
focusing on the gravity of 9/11; people are not only falling to the ground, but seem to be
figuratively drawn into the black hole created by 9/11 that absorbs lives, memories and hope for
the future.
Much like the real life 9/11 survivor Racquel Kelley, in Foer‟s novel Oskar‟s memory is
continually haunted by 9/11 and the image he found on the internet of the falling man. During an
appointment with a psychiatrist, Oskar associates the word “emergency” with his father (Foer
202), indicating that his mind has formed a connection between his father‟s death and situations
of crises via the link of 9/11. The falling man makes one of his many appearances in the novel
shortly after this as one of the photographs that Foer includes within the text; the image is placed
within a broken conversation between the psychiatrist and Oskar‟s mother that he overhears. It is
not surprising that Oskar thinks of the falling man (a symbol of hopelessness and imminent
destruction) as Dr. Fein suggests that he may be a danger to himself and may require
hospitalization. Later, Oskar listens to one of the messages left by his father immediately
preceding his death and he asks himself why he did not pick up the phone and say goodbye or
Rossi 24
tell his father he loved him. Oskar then bruises himself, as he typically does when he is upset; the
bruises are a physical mark and operate as a concrete representation of his emotional pain as a
result of 9/11. The bruises on his body are as numbered as the images and thoughts of the
terrorist attacks are within his mind.
Just as important to the narrative as Oskar‟s memories and reconciliations with 9/11 are
his grandfather‟s recollections of the bombing in Dresden. Foer effectively examines the
influence of trauma and disaster on time through the grandfather‟s description of the first
bombing of Dresden, which “lasted less than half an hour, but…felt like days and weeks, like the
world was going to end” (210). Thomas Sr. describes how during the first bombing he left the
shelter to go find Anna, his girlfriend, between the air strikes and places his hands on a hot
doorknob which burns the skin from his palms. Outside, corpses are trampled in the chaos and
Thomas describes the scene by saying that “everyone was losing everyone” (Foer 211).
Ironically, Oskar uses similar words to describe life earlier in a novel, which seems to point to
the nature of trauma and how it transcends the boundaries of time and nationality (Foer 74). In
the midst of Thomas‟s description of a “woman whose blond hair and green dress were on
fire…running with a silent baby in her arms” and “humans melted into thick pools of liquid,”
Foer inserts a picture of a doorknob, which is a photograph that Thomas took of the apartment he
shared with Oskar‟s grandmother (211, 212). However, the doorknob holds a deeper significance
as marking Thomas‟s transition from a lover and new father to a voluntary mute who abandons
his wife and son because he is so stricken with grief and fear. According to sociologist Elzbieta
Halas, “Trauma as a cultural process is based on symbolization,” and for Thomas Sr. the
doorknob is a symbol of his own personal trauma (318).
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Similarly, the symbols for Oskar consist of skyscrapers and the falling man, and extend to
Pierce‟s “Newsworld,” in which the high school boys attempt to use the San Francisco exhibit
for their symbol, which I will discuss toward the end of this chapter. The image of the falling
man is also a symbol for DeLillo‟s novel, most obviously as the title for the narrative. However,
the idea of gravity which I examined earlier is yet another important symbol for DeLillo‟s work
as things are constantly falling. The frequency of these kinds of symbols in the literature
concerning 9/11 suggests that humans need something simple – like a picture – in order to
summarize the complex web of emotions and memories that accompany an event like the
terrorists attacks. Ultimately, the most universal symbol of 9/11 is of course the twin towers,
which encapsulate a variety of concepts from America as an economic superpower to a memorial
for the civil servants and people who died there and is now immortalized in the memories of
people like Dina Lafond.
In addition to symbols, memory also operates through a process of categorization. In his
novel, Foer challenges society‟s process of labeling for acts of war and acts of terror. Through
Thomas‟s horrifically detailed description of the bombing of Dresden, coupled with an account
of the bombing of Hiroshima in the previous chapter, Foer tempts the reader to consider whether
both can be considered acts of terrorism deliberately aimed at civilian targets and if they are
therefore comparable to the attack on the World Trade Center. DeLillo also subtly qualifies acts
of terrorism via Martin, the lover of Lianne‟s mother, who was formerly a German domestic
terrorist. Lianne contemplates the idea of a western, non-Muslim terrorist and the demarcations
people create between acts of violence at the end of the novel: “Maybe he was a terrorist but he
was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her – one of ours, which meant
godless, Western, white” (DeLillo 195). Memory has a vital role in how people perceive cultural
Rossi 26
events and determine whether they are acts of terrorism or appropriate acts of war performed in
the best interest of the global community. Furthermore, it may be that the mental act of labeling
these events is necessary for the process of healing by the simplifying motives of the offenders.
Just as Thomas Sr. described his experience in Dresden, the grandmother shares her
perception of 9/11 and how it made her recall a horrible storm from her childhood in which a
large tree nearly fell on her family‟s house. Here, Foer‟s novel parallels “Newsworld II” by
demonstrating the repetition and sensationalism of the terrorist attacks on television:
The same pictures over and over.
Planes going into buildings.
Bodies falling.
People waving shirts out of high windows.
Planes going into buildings.
People covered in gray dust.
Bodies falling.
Buildings falling.
Planes going into buildings (230).
This recitation of images has the characteristics of a rhyme-less, meter-less poem that continues
throughout the chapter and meshes with her memories of the storm from her childhood. Foer
demonstrates that memory affected by trauma draws from previous experiences to interpret
Rossi 27
present conditions; the grandmother‟s memory breaks with time and the chronology of events to
allow for a more fluid and comprehensive view of her life. The emphasis on the media in both
“Newsworld II” and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close also highlights the extent to which
television may have constructed the mental images, and therefore memories, of 9/11 by exposing
millions of people to the same footage and pictures.
In addition to relating her experience of 9/11, the grandmother states that there was a
sequence of events that made 9/11 possible: “Every moment before this one depends on this one.
Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment” (Foer 232). Her
theory suggests that replacing one link in the chain of time creates a whole new alternate reality.
Shortly after she makes this declaration is a picture taken from a CNN broadcast of the crash of
the Staten Island Ferry. More important than the actual image is the news ticker running
underneath the image that reads “Fall of Saddam Hussein is „Good Riddance,‟ Pres Bush” (Foer
241). This small detail in the photograph echoes back to the grandmother‟s commentary on time
and history by selecting an event, namely the Iraq War, which occurred as a direct result of 9/11.
The concept of changing memories and creating a different outcome is continued in the
following chapter when the grandmother has a dream in which everything is in reverse,
beginning with the bombing of Dresden in which the bombs go back up into the planes. Later,
she remarks that she has “forgotten everything important in [her] life,” thus further testing the
possibility that America will never forget 9/11 (Foer 308). In her dream she remembers how she
found her father crushed under the plaster ceiling of her childhood home, but because everything
happens in reverse “the tears went up his cheeks and back into his eyes” (Foer 309). Finally her
dream ends with the story of Eden and Eve returning the apple to the tree (313). Oskar rearranges
the last images of the book to show the Falling Man floating up into the sky, echoing his
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grandmother‟s reverse dream and ending the novel on a hopeful note. Both Oskar and his
grandmother‟s revisions of history offer the possibility of a new beginning, suggesting that it
may be necessary for people to forget trauma in order to move forward. At the very least, the
conclusion of Foer‟s novel poses the question of whether or not it is possible to faithfully
remember a tragedy while simultaneously live an emotionally and mentally healthy life.
Just like the novels of DeLillo and Foer, the structure of “Rescue Me” easily lends itself
to a discussion of the relationship between time and memory. In what may be one of the most
important moments of the entire series thus far, the episode from the first season titled “Inches”
begins with a scene from 9/11. However, it is unclear whether this is a dream or Tommy‟s actual
experience. The crew of Ladder 69 arrives at the first tower where people are screaming as they
leave the building. Office paper ominously falls from the sky and one of the firemen warns to
“watch out for jumpers” (“Inches”). In a trance-like state, Tommy observes people with their
skin burned off and others trying to call their loved ones on cell phones. Regardless of whether
this is precisely how Tommy‟s 9/11 experience occurred or if it is simply one of his dreams, the
scene is important because it communicates Tommy‟s attitude toward the event and the fear that
he tries to keep hidden from his friends and family.
“Rescue Me” is also similar to the novels and an important fixture of post-9/11 culture
through its subtle challenge to the slogan “never forget.” This comparison is first evident when a
cop tells Tommy in the first season that the hero worship of the firemen after 9/11 is over and the
chief‟s wife develops symptoms of Alzheimer‟s that culminate in the inability to recognize her
husband. Furthermore, the final episode of the first season provides a perspective of New York
three years after 9/11 as the crew members look at where the World Trade Center used to be and
offer their own interpretations of the memorial plans for Ground Zero:
Rossi 29
Franco: It‟s like they‟re trying to erase what happened, you know?
Chief: It‟s insulting! Remember how they had those spotlights right after 9/11? I
couldn‟t take that. I like it like this – empty. Just the way those scumbags left it.
No spotlights. No new buildings. Just empty. (“Sanctuary”)
Next, Tommy critiques how people begin to resent the heroes of 9/11 once they realize they are
not perfect. Kenny then denounces the terrorists by juxtaposing their attack with the
determination of the firefighters: “they threw a couple of jets into a couple of buildings and they
threw at us the biggest job in the history of our profession. And what did we do? We gave up 343
of our guys to save at least 10,000” (“Sanctuary”). In response, Tommy remarks how it is three
years later and they still haven‟t received a raise and concludes the observation of the gap in the
New York skyline by saying “We were on our own that morning, and we‟re still on our own
today” (“Sanctuary”). Tommy‟s commentary on how the American public and its government
have abandoned the cause of the firefighters who served in the World Trade Center calls to mind
the congressional debate concerning monetary compensation for rescue workers who suffered
health complications after their exposure to the dust at Ground Zero.
The characters of “Newsworld II” are different from those of the novels and “Rescue
Me” because they were not present in New York City during the terrorist attacks. Nevertheless,
sociologists point out that trauma is “not limited to the experience of those who directly
participated in the … event” (Halas 317). As a result, the boys strive to fill the emotional
distance that they feel toward the event through the amusement park, Newsworld, in their
hometown. The namesake of the story is representative of how American culture remembers,
perhaps inappropriately, tragedies and events of historical significance by translating them into
Rossi 30
an entertainment form. In Newsworld, the public vicariously experiences events like the sinking
of the titanic and guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, which results in the hardships and trials of
previous generations becoming “lives spun out as entertainment” (Pierce 196). The description
of the amusement park coupled with the event of 9/11 raises the question of whether the terrorist
attacks will be commemorated and passed on to future generations through similar
entertainment. Furthermore, it is not unreasonable to say that this has already happened as a
result of movies like World Trade Center and United 93, and could even be said of the works I
have presented in this project.
Returning to the visual repetition of the terrorist attacks in the media, the narrator of
“Newsworld II” and his friends‟ knowledge of 9/11 is limited to what they saw on television.
Pierce captures the media‟s obsession with 9/11 and the repetitive, cyclical broadcasting of the
destruction of the World Trade Center when the narrator opens the story: “We watched it in
social studies, then in world history. That Friday, September 14, we saw it again in a class called
life studies” (Pierce 194). The narrator‟s exposure to 9/11 is compounded by his mother, who
“watched all day, clicking from one channel to the next …. [observing] the smoldering remains
of the towers, surrounded by other buildings experts believed would collapse as well” (Pierce
197). Despite the boys‟ overexposure to the terrorist attacks, they still feel as though they lack a
true, emotional and mature understanding of the event. Because of this curiosity, the boys break
into the park at night in order to see the San Francisco earthquake exhibit so they can “stand
among the crumpled buildings, the piles of bricks and metal covered by a fine, simulated dust”
(Pierce 198). The value of trying to recreate the destruction is that of a vicarious experience for
the boys not unlike that of tourists who visit Ground Zero. In “Newsworld II,” the young men try
to create their own Ground Zero in order to elicit the necessary catharsis.
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However, when the boys finally reach their destination it is barricade with plywood – to
demonstrate sensitivity to the community in the days following 9/11 – and security guards
intercept the boys. Thus, it seems as though comprehension is just beyond the reach of the young
men in a way that reflects how elusive the meaning of 9/11 is for people everywhere. Perhaps an
explanation for the media‟s obsession with the terrorist attacks and the movies that profit by
recreating the event rests in the narrator‟s defense of why he and his friends broke into the park:
“we felt we might better understand what had happened in New York if we could be inside the
park for a while, on this street where buildings had been destroyed by a different tragedy”
(Pierce 198). For people who did not experience 9/11 first-hand, seeing images of the tragedy
and hearing stories about what it was like provide an opportunity for understanding and
emotional release.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Falling Man, Rescue Me, and “Newsworld II” are
peopled with characters who “never forget.” Throughout each of their stories, the reader and
audience observe as they try to obtain closure and organize their memories. However, this
struggle is not simply a construct limited to fictional works, but is a quotidian fact of life for real
people, as evidenced by the StoryCorps interviews. 9/11 casts a shadow on the passage of time as
the orphaned children grow to resemble their deceased parents, as bells are rung and names are
read aloud. Furthermore, the process of coping and memorializing is often complicated, painful
and elusive. The next section explores incidents of violence in the texts and their effect on the
character‟s perceptions of reality. Without contest, the terrorist attack is the greatest display of
violence illustrated in these works. The physical act of the planes colliding with the buildings
and resulting in the deaths of thousands prompts subsequent violent outbursts and, because of the
surreal nature of 9/11, changed the limits of what people perceive of as possible and impossible.
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VIOLENCE AND REALITY
While 9/11 has created a new community within American society in which people are
connected by the fine threads of trauma and memory, the terrorist attacks also caused many
people to push others away. This was the reaction of Samuel Fields, who was 10 years old when
his father died in the World Trade Center. Samuel did not cry and grieve with his mother, but
instead “jumped off the steep rocks in Central Park, punched a classmate and, the following
summer, wound up in jail for pelting cars with stones” (Elliot, “Growing Up Grieving”). Only
after this did Samuel cry for his loss. Like Samuel, so many other people who directly
experienced 9/11 could not accept the reality of their new lives as a widow, widower, survivor,
or an orphan. Consequently, their emotions translated into actions that were self-destructive and
somewhat violent.
Oskar, the young protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is similar to
Samuel in the way that he too lost a father in the World Trade Center and began to inflict pain on
himself and fantasize about hurting others. In a more exaggerated example, Tommy Gavin of
Rescue Me is in a constant downward spiral of alcoholism and rage (all while maintaining a
swaggering masculine veneer) of which 9/11 was the genesis. Even in “Newsworld,” the
southern high school boys struggle with defining their emotions toward the catastrophe; one boy
says that it makes him “angry,” and another later punches the plywood barrier that blocks the
San Francisco exhibit (Pierce 195, 200). Each of these works, despite being fiction, explore the
shifting mirage line between reality and perception and the violence that the inability to cope
breeds.
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However, in exploring the theme of violence in post-9/11 fiction, I not only consider the
violence that the characters inflict on others, but how the hijackers‟ violent actions on September
11, 2001 have affected individual people. Indeed, this second question is perhaps even more
significant as the horrific and twofold massacre in downtown New York City is clearly defined
in each of the works as the root of the characters‟ outbursts. In Foer‟s novel for example, the
concept of violence is largely conveyed through his protagonist‟s expectation of another terrorist
attack. Oskar‟s fears demonstrate how the violence of 9/11 affected the reality of our everyday
lives by creating a surreal sensation. Like the children interviewed by Andrea Elliott for her New
York Times article who related their fears of “low flying planes” (Elliot, “Growing Up
Grieving”), Oskar relates the severity of his own anxieties when he describes how “There was a
lot of stuff that made [him] panicky, like suspension bridges, germs, airplanes, fireworks” (Foer
36). Like many people in a post-9/11 America, Oskar is also nervous around Arab people in
public places, but denies that he is a racist. The nine-year-old concludes the list by relating how
he felt as though he “was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space… everything was
incredibly far away” (Foer 36). Later, while preparing to begin his adventure around New York
City, Oskar packs “iodine pills in case of a dirty bomb” along with several other items. Oskar‟s
anticipation of another terrorist attack is indicative of how terrorism became an immediate
concern to society after 9/11. To the generation of children raised in the spectral glow of the
memorial lights at Ground Zero, fears of biological warfare are as threatening as those of atomic
bombs to the baby boomers in the Cold War/nuclear age.
While Oskar never physically takes his anger out on others, he does experience the desire
to injure certain people. Oskar has a violent fantasy while in a performance of Hamlet at his
Rossi 34
school. He thinks of beating up the boy playing Hamlet, who bullies him frequently, and in his
imagined fury he thinks:
I smash [the papier-mâché skull] against JIMMY SNYDER‟s head and I smash it
again. He falls to the ground, because he is unconscious, and I can’t believe how
strong I actually am. I smash his head again with all my force and blood starts to
come out of his nose and ears. But I still don’t feel any sympathy for him.
I want him to bleed, because he deserves it. And nothing else makes any
sense….There is blood everywhere, covering everything. I keep smashing the skull
against his skull, which is also RON’s skull (for letting MOM get on with life)
and MOM‟s skull (for getting on with life) and DAD‟s skull (for dying) and
GRANDMA‟s skull (for embarrassing me so much) and DR. FEIN‟s skull (for
asking if any good could come out of DAD‟s death) and the skulls of everyone
else I know. (Foer 146).
Oskar‟s sadness and confusion as a result of 9/11 leads to his desire to annihilate his bully.
Another violent fantasy appears later when Dr. Fein asks if “any good can come from [his]
father‟s death” (Foer 203). Again, the transition from reality to violent fantasy is seamless: “Do I
think any good can come from my father‟s death? …. I kicked over my chair, threw his papers
across the floor, and hollered, „No! Of course not, you fucking asshole!‟ That was what I wanted
to do. Instead I just shrugged my shoulders” (Foer 203). Because Oskar merely daydreams about
doing these violent acts, rather than allowing his rage to manifest, it is clear that he feels
restricted. Literally, Oskar‟s reality is that he cannot act out violently because he will be sent to
the hospital for not coping in a socially acceptable way.
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The real physical injuries for which Oskar is responsible are inflicted on himself; he
bruises himself in order to provide a punishment and as a distraction from his emotional pain.
For example, when Oskar listens to the last message his father left on 9/11 he makes a bruise in
order to punish himself for not picking up the phone and telling his father that he loved him
(Foer 207). Later in the narrative, his mother changes him into his pajamas and discovers over 40
bruises on his body – a flesh and blood map of his grief and frustration (Foer 172). This is just
one more connection between violence and reality as Oskar uses the marks to make his pain
seem real, as if he is signing a document that verifies his suffering.
The violence in DeLillo‟s novel is more explicit and is not merely a fantasy, but causes
real damage. The central personal conflict in the novel occurs between Lianne and Elena, a
woman who lives in the apartment building and listens to Middle Eastern music. This music not
only seems to amplify the presence of Muslims in America just days after the attacks, but also
offends Lianne, who interprets it as an insensitive political statement. Lianne confronts the
woman about the “noise” and when Elena accuses her of being sensitive, she retorts that “The
whole city is ultrasensitive right now” (DeLillo 120). Lianne‟s description is accurate not only
for New York City in the days immediately following the attacks, but even in contemporary
terms in the way that the minor conflict between the women can be compared to the negative
reaction of the general American public to the Islamic center to be built near Ground Zero.
Ultimately, Lianne ends the confrontation by jamming her hand into Elena‟s left eye (DeLillo
120), thus acting on her uncomfortable and xenophobic impulse to do harm to the woman who is
a part of the ethnic and religious group that attacked America.
Later in the same chapter, Keith punches a man at a mattress store whom he overhears
making what he believes is a derogatory comment about his lover and fellow 9/11 survivor,
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Florence. After punching the man across the face, he realizes that he would be willing to kill for
Florence (DeLillo 133). The violent outbursts of Lianne and Keith call into question whether
violence is appropriate in the name of love; Lianne attacked Elena in defense of New York City,
Keith fought the man for Florence, and the terrorists attacked America in the name of Islam. Foer
proposes a similar question in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close through Oskar‟s observation
that “„Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with
lips‟” (Foer 99). Consequently, the reader must consider that violence is just one of the many
facets of being human. Although it may be tempting to refer to the 9/11 hijackers as monsters or
evil-doers, the reality is that they were as human as the people who died in the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania. The act of recognizing the universal humanity adds a
whole new layer of horror and confusion to the event as people try to comprehend how people
can inflict such incredible pain on other members of the human race. Furthermore, although it is
certainly not justifiable nor excusable, the terrorists‟ plot was founded in the desire to make a
mark and demonstrate that they had a powerful place in the world; they wanted to make America
pay for years of exploitation and imperialism and to show that they could leave a bruise on the
leader of the Western world.
The disorder which Oskar, in Foer‟s novel, and Lianne and Keith, in DeLillo‟s novel,
create pales in comparison to the alcoholic and self-destructive Tommy Gavin of “Rescue Me”.
In the chapter discussing death and rituals, I note that Tommy is literally haunted by the ghosts
of his fallen comrades and the victims he has failed to save and how his hyper-masculine persona
operates as a defense mechanism. Here I will examine how the combination of Tommy‟s mental
instability and the importance of masculinity result in explosive anger. As one critic of the show
has said of the relationship between 9/11 and the protagonist‟s reactionary behavior, “Gavin‟s
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unstable mental state is apparently modeled on the imperiled world he‟s somehow found himself
in” (Aoun 206).
An example of the connection between Tommy‟s experience in the World Trade Center
and his use of violence occurs when he has a flashback to 9/11 while sitting in traffic. He is
shaken from his memory by a man who yells at him; Tommy beats the man up and tears up a
9/11 “fallen heroes” card in his car. This incident demonstrates just how much Tommy is
affected and traumatized by his 9/11 experience, years after the attack. Furthermore, Tommy‟s
self-imposed need to appear masculine, one of the rituals mentioned in a previous chapter,
prevents him from expressing himself in a healthy manner. Just as the Middle Eastern music
prompted Lianne to strike Elena and Oskar‟s sadness toward his father‟s death manifests in
violent fantasies, Tommy‟s grief over the loss of his cousin in the World Trade Center is often
translated into a physical rage. A perfect example of grief-to-rage equation of emotions occurs in
the beginning of the second season when Tommy confronts the people who make a profit off of
9/11 by peddling cookies, books and souvenirs at the perimeter of Ground Zero; he upends their
tables, throws the cookies and then urinates on a table of other 9/11 memorabilia (“Voicemail”).
The dichotomy between Tommy‟s perception of reality and that of the peddlers and tourists
affirms that reality is comparable to a Rorschach ink blot in which two people rarely see the
same thing. For the tourists, their visitation of Ground Zero is a kind of pilgrimage that they
certify with the purchase of a souvenir. For Tommy, however, Ground Zero is more commercial
than a Nazi death camp would be to a holocaust survivor.
Tied to the theme of violence is that of reality, or rather the lack thereof, resulting in
surrealism. Borrowing the terms of the psychologist Lacan, 9/11 has broken the wall between
reality and “the real” by changing the perspective of America from a mere observer into a target
Rossi 38
and an “object” (Sass 162, 163). Louis Sass applies Lacan‟s concept directly to 9/11 by
identifying the World Trade Center as an “emphatic statement of power” whose destruction left
America “brutally shaken out of…complacency, and forced now to scan the horizons of a world
from which [it] can no longer feel apart” (164, 165).
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, surrealism is present in Thomas Sr.‟s first
impression of the news coverage of the terrorist attacks as a commercial or a new movie (Foer
272). Furthermore, a deeper representation of surrealism is in the grandparent‟s division of their
apartment into places that are “nothing,” where you can “temporarily cease to exist,” to the
extent that doorknobs become the dividing line between something and nothing and a passage
between two places (Foer 110). More abstractly, 9/11 is also a doorknob that divides past and
present, demarcating the line between reality and the real, a passage that opened in the minutes
between when the first tower collapsed and the second prostrated in its wake. From the moment
the second plane made impact, 9/11 had already created the rift between reality and America‟s
delusions of safety. In DeLillo‟s novel, Keith thought the first plane‟s impact was merely an
accident, like so many did that day, but comments that “by the time the second plane
appears…we‟re all a little older and wiser” (DeLillo 135).
Just as Thomas Sr. in Foer‟s novel equated the first images of 9/11 with some form of
fabricated entertainment, Keith also struggles with reconciling something as absurd as planes
crashing into skyscrapers with the familiar and mundane images of life in a city. An example of
Keith‟s altered perception of reality is when he sees a woman on a horse in the middle of city
traffic. For him, the image is a vivid, living non sequitur that‟s not unlike the surrealism of two
jet planes colliding with a city skyline:
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[The horse] belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that
resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the
seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to
tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash (DeLillo 103).
The above quote in which DeLillo expounds on the surrealism of 9/11 and of New York City
after the attacks effectively captures the inherent chaos that rose like smoke from the ruins of
Ground Zero. The absurdist style that the author employs here when speaking of life after 9/11,
especially the Falling Man performance artist, is perhaps the best literary tool with which to
discuss the terrorist attacks.
The absurd is universal in each of the works I examine, thus emphasizing the elusive
nature of 9/11 as a literary topic. For example, in “Newsworld II,” Pierce ironically bases his
narrative around a theme park that specializes in infotainment. Similarly, Foer selects a child as
his narrator, resulting in text that is a stream of consciousness and littered with pictures. Oskar‟s
inventions also add an absurd quality to the novel as he imagines impossible machines that
would protect against attacks like 9/11. However, Rescue Me is certainly the most absurd due to
Tommy‟s hallucinations; beginning in the second season he has conversations with Jesus, who is
surprisingly modern, humorous and sexual. Because 9/11 directly contradicted America‟s selfperception as a superpower impervious to foreign threats, the literary device of the absurd is
appropriate for illustrating a moment in time that shifted politics and social interaction on a
global scale.
The cultural products that 9/11 has inspired can also be grouped into what society deems
appropriate and inappropriate; some works have been applauded while others scorned and
Rossi 40
accused of profiting from 9/11. The movie Remember Me, released in 2010, is a prime example
of how a cultural product that deals with 9/11 can be perceived as crude; in the conclusion of the
film the audience realizes that the main character is in the World Trade Center and that the day is
September 11, 2001. Although the actual impact of the plane is never shown, the realization is
still horrifying and reviewers like Rolling Stone have described it as “shockingly offensive”
(Travers). However, I question why this film is categorized as being in bad taste, while Oliver
Stone‟s 2006 World Trade Center was hailed as an “emotionally unassailable film” by the same
reviewer that scorned Remember Me four years later (Travers); are they not both, as Pierce says
in “Newsworld II,” “lives spun out as entertainment”? The greater question at hand is whether or
not there is a way to respectfully fictionalize an event in which thousands of people died.
The future is always uncertain and so it is impossible to know how people will think of
9/11 in the years to come and the various ways in which they will craft art from tragedy. In terms
of Rescue Me, a conclusion for Tommy Gavin‟s story arrives shortly after the completion of this
project and Denis Leary has promised that “there is a final twist that is, in the true spirit of
Rescue Me, both dramatic and comedic” (“Denis Leary to the Rescue”). I hope that I have
analyzed 9/11 in a respectful fashion, producing something that is as much a tribute to the rescue
workers, the lives that were lost and the families of the victims as it is an academic study of a
historical event.
Rossi 41
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