Falling Man: encounters with catastrophic change

The assault on the twin towers thrust Americans into an encounter with catastrophic change. Previously protected by the illusion of security fed by our relative imperviousness to others' points of view, we are harshly awakened to our defensive blindness. This rupture helps us see the particular beyond the seeming universality, locating culture as a variable frame defining meanings through the narratives that hold complexities of human experience in conceptual space. Don DeLillo's Falling Man offers a reading of catastrophe as a forced encounter with fallibility, breaking apart illusions of sameness and difference, towards integration of what trauma excludes from awareness.