Ivan Delazari

Suspension of Belief: Don DeLillo’s 9/11

PUBLISHED IN: American Experience – The Experience of America: Gdansk

Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture, Vol. 2 / Ed.

Andrzej Ceynowa and Marek Wilczynsky. Frankfurt am Main: Peter

Lang, 2013. P. 213-220.

Don DeLillo’s personal experience of September 11, 2001 was

similar to that of many ordinary Americans. When the second tower

fell, he phoned his nephew, who was at home with his family at

“meager distance” from the World Trade Center, and talked to him

for a while. Six, and then another ten days later, the writer

walked to Ground Zero and looked at the site through Rent-A-Fence

barriers (DeLillo, “In the Ruins” 37-38). From the narrative

sections of DeLillo’s essay published in Harper’s Magazine in

December that year, we may deduce that the writer also received a

full first-hand account of what had been happening to his

relatives on that day, since he reports their experience in

detail. “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and

1

Loss in the Shadow of September” juxtaposes autobiography with

social thought, political philosophy, and new journalism in the

attempt to grasp the recent experience, which is still incredible

and “unreal” in a nightmarish fashion:

It was bright and totalizing, and some of us said it

was unreal. When we say a thing is unreal, we mean it

is too real, a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so

bound to the power of objective fact that we can’t tilt

it to the slant of our perceptions. First the planes

struck the towers. After a time it became possible for

us to absorb this, barely. But when the towers fell.

When the rolling smoke began moving downward, floor to

floor. This was so vast and terrible that it was

outside imagining even as it happened. We could not

catch up to it. (38-9)

That feeling of unreality was shared by millions of people

exposed to the various ongoing reproductions of the event via

televised footage, onlooker reports, official documents,

2

conspiracy theories, and a whole range of the Internet “rumor,

fantasy, and mystical reverberation” (DeLillo, “In the Ruins”

35). The failure to fully believe that 9/11 was true “as was,”

and even to trust one’s own senses, results from the very

mediation of experience, since most of the media involved allow

endless repetitions, similar to how a film may be replayed, or a

novel reread. Furthermore, even for the immediate witnesses of

the fall of the towers, their commonly shared knowledge of

special effects from disaster movies stood between what they

actually saw and what they were ready to accept as reality beyond

any screen, a fact of life. Thus the “suspension of disbelief” a

reader of fiction and a movie-viewer may practice to various

extent in order to amplify the “effect of reality” produced by a

work of art turns into its very opposite, which I suggest to

refer to as suspension of belief. We sometimes cannot help

ignoring the imaginary nature of fictional narratives, and we cry

our eyes out while sympathizing with fictitious characters under

the Balzacian impression that “all is true,” which we may then do

away with. Here, in reverse, we have to suspend our knowledge

3

that the events we face are real, and need to unlearn

disbelieving in them: we have to “catch up to it.”

Along with its strong emotional appeal, DeLillo’s “In the

Ruins of the Future” explains 9/11 as the day on which the

future-oriented progressivism of the American technoculture was

efficiently negated by the very past it had been developing away

from, so that “whatever great skeins of technology lie ahead,

ever more complex, connective, precise, micro-fractional, the

future has yielded, for now, to medieval expedience, to the old

slow furies of cutthroat religion” (37). DeLillo chooses to

theorize this temporal deviation as a clash of narratives, rather

than of civilizations, developing his earlier (and many say,

prophetic) view from Mao II that terrorists have nowadays

surpassed fiction writers, and that “the world narrative belongs

to terrorists” (“In the Ruins” 33), who seized it by destroying a

history of progress in order to “bring back the past,” the old

single-truth narrative in the minds and deeds of the terrorists

of 9/11: “The Bush Administration was feeling a nostalgia for the

Cold War. This is over now. Many things are over. The narrative

4

ends in the rubble, and it is left to us to create the counter-

narrative” (34).

Ending America’s steady march towards the future culminating

in the victorious Cold War, 9/11 initiated the counter-narrative,

whose main difference from both the former world narrative of

linear development and the timeless truth of Islamic

fundamentalism is multiplicity. DeLillo’s concept of “counter-

narrative” is central not only to the very essay in which he

suggests it, as the essay itself is part of it, but to his view

of all possible approaches to the experience of 9/11, both non-

fictional and novelistic. Although “[i]n its desertion of every

basis for comparison, the event asserts its singularity” (39),

there is no single true version of the event. It disperses in

stories, whose every petty detail about ordinary people and

incredible coincidences is to be collected into that multiple

point of view counter-narrative, often inconsistent, hardly

verifiable, and generally unbelievable: “There are a hundred

thousand stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the

world. Where we were, whom we know, what we’ve seen or heard”

(34). DeLillo’s concept of counter-narrative sounds like a

5

political stance, but as such it lacks a call for action. His

action is reflection, hence the title. His politics is

descriptive in trying to accommodate “the ruins of the future” by

justifying a narrative poetics, in which the logical borders

between fact and fiction have been abandoned: “For the next fifty

years, people who were not in the area when the attacks occurred

will claim to have been there. In time, some of them will believe

it. Others will claim to have lost friends or relatives, although

they did not” (35). According to DeLillo’s logic, such “false

memories and imagined loss” contribute to the same cause as The

9/11 Commission Report. One would not go too far in suggesting that

so does fiction, since “the writer begins in the towers,” too.

Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man was released in 2007.

In one of the interviews following publication, the author

says, “I didn’t want to write a novel in which the attacks occur

over the character’s right shoulder and affect a few lives in a

distant sort of way. I wanted to be in the towers and in the

planes” (“Intensity”). Although DeLillo’s emphasis on the

primarily empathetic effort of penetrating the experience

otherwise inaccessible by the power of imagination seems to build

6

the case for a direct application of the principles and themes he

developed in his essay to the novel, he goes on pointing out the

gap between the essay and the novel:

I never thought of the attacks in terms of fiction at

all, for at least three years. I was working on

Cosmopolis on September 11th, and I just stopped dead

for some time, and decided to work on the essay

instead. Later, after I finished Cosmopolis, I had been

thinking about another novel for some months when I

began thinking about what would become Falling Man. What

made it happen was a visual image: a man in a suit and

tie, carrying a briefcase, walking through a storm of

smoke and ash. I had nothing beyond that. And then a

few days later, it occurred to me that the briefcase

was not his. And that seemed to start a chain of

thought that led to the actual setting of words on

paper. (“Intensity”)

7

DeLillo marks the “terms of fiction” as opposed to those of

the essay, as if the latter’s imaginative aspect must be denied.

By separating fiction from non-fiction in his interview DeLillo

may credit the old inferiority complex of fiction writing as just

“pretending,” when he talks about his own intention.

It was particularly the author’s intention that John Searle

made the foundation of his famous distinction between serious and

fictional utterances, overruling the critique of “intentional

fallacy”. In his well-known 1975 article “The Logical Status of

Fictional Discourse,” Searle argues that “the author of a work of

fiction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary acts,

normally of the representative type,” and that “the identifying

criterion for whether or not a text is a work of fiction must of

necessity lie in the illocutionary intentions of the author”

(325). Searle applies the same criterion in order to tell fiction

from lying: unlike in the latter case, and similar to a player in

a game of charade, the author pretends “without any intent to

deceive” (324).

In accordance with that classification, DeLillo was serious

in writing the essay, whereas in Falling Man he pretended there was

8

a Keith Neudecker to walk out of the burning tower carrying a

stranger’s briefcase, which the author had only imagined to have

happened. In the essay, DeLillo performs serious illocutionary

acts with full responsibility for the true account of his own

vision of 9/11. In the novel, he makes fictional references to

and assertions about characters, thereby creating them, even when

granting Keith and others with real-life experiences, or

portraying a real person, the leading 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Amir

Atta, through the lens of a fictional terrorist, Hammad.

The fragility of the Searle distinction leaning on the

intentional criterion is demonstrated in DeLillo’s 2001 essay,

where in the passage quoted above he describes a border case.

People who deliberately imagine things to mislead others about

their experience of the 9/11 attacks (i.e. liars, in Searle’s

terms) may then shift into truly believing in their own

falsities, whereby their utterances cannot but acquire the status

of serious illocutionary acts. Being too much of a clinical case,

it is not in Searle’s classification. Searle would most probably

have denied the truth claims of such utterances, because for him

referentiality of discourse is essential for it to be serious.

9

Searle grouped In Cold Blood and The Armies of the Night with serious

assertions; for him, Capote and Mailer were literature, but not

fiction (319). In modifying Searle by placing fictional

narratives with incomplete, i.e. elliptical, but quite serious

indirect speech acts of request (“Imagine that…”) or declaration

(“I decree fictionally that…”), Gerard Genette, in Fiction & Diction

(45-46), lays claims on the reader’s imaginative powers rather

than the author’s intention to pretend. For Genette, the problem

of telling fictional narratives from factual ones was far more

complicated, with various fusions at play; and yet he refrained

from seeing factuality as totally irrelevant. He does not seem to

consider that in a narrative treatment of, say, some incredible

experience, such as the 9/11 terrorist acts, the indirect speech

act of request can be implied in a factual as well as fictional

(or deceptive) utterance about it: “Imagine that [I was there

when] the Twin Towers fell.” No matter how many traces and/or

formal attributes of either factual or fictional narrative we may

find in DeLillo’s 9/11 essay and novel, both pieces contribute to

the counter-narrative, which for DeLillo remains valuable even

10

when failing to meet Searle’s requirements, and even when it

involves deliberate or pathological lying.

Keith Neudecker, Florence Givens, and the terrorist Hammad

are the three immediate participants of 9/11, the former two

surviving the attacks in the World Trade Center after the latter

dies aboard Flight 11. DeLillo contrasts the survivors’

experience to the hijacker’s by putting their respective stories

on two different timelines, one gradually catching up with the

other: each of the three parts of the novel end with a Hammad

chapter, taking him from Marienstrasse in Hamburg to Nokomis,

Florida to the plane crashing into the tower where Keith and

Florence are. Other chapters are all set “after the planes.”

Falling Man opens with Keith walking away from the World Trade

Center on September 11; the moment Hammad strikes the tower, his

story ceases for obvious reasons, whereas Keith’s timeline

restarts at the end of the novel from the moment preceding its

beginning: we find him in the tower just struck.

Silence is only adequate for the unaccountable experience,

“unreal” in the sense that it resists all media promoting the

reality effect. In Falling Man, Keith does not speak about 9/11 to

11

anyone but himself. Coming to fetch his things from the apartment

near what is now Ground Zero, he expresses that sense of

unreality with a mantra recently heard from a stranger, who stood

next to him by the fence looking at the ruins:

He said, “I’m standing here,” and then, louder,

“I’m standing here.”

In the movie version, someone would be in the

building, an emotionally damaged or a homeless old man,

and there would be dialogue and close-ups. (27)

Here the author grants his own genuine experience (“In the

Ruins” 38) to the character, who sees himself as a character in a

film. Experience is thus forever lost; any attempt to regain it

is fictionalizing. When Keith becomes listener to Florence, who

goes on talking away her memories of being in the tower, he

eventually confronts the notion that she is merely romanticizing

the experience, by imposing on it the cause-and-effect pattern of

a love story:

12

“… You ask yourself why you took the briefcase out

of the building. That’s why. So you could bring it

here. So we could get to know each other. That’s why

you took it and that’s why you brought it here, to keep

me alive.”

He didn’t believe this but he believed her. She

felt it and meant it.

“You ask yourself what the story is that goes with

the briefcase. I’m the story,” she said. (108-9)

Further unfolding of Florence’s remark would suggest that

the whole tragedy of 9/11 was for their love’s sake; but DeLillo

negates the romance: towards the end of the novel, we find out

that Florence and Keith’s affair only lasted a few days.

Applied to Keith, Gennette’s formula of fictional utterances

as indirect request becomes negative: “[I cannot tell, and you

cannot] imagine that [I was there when] the Twin Towers fell.”

Unlike Melville’s Ishmael, who “escaped alone to tell thee” in

Job’s footsteps, DeLillo’s Keith has no intention to tell, as he

gradually restores his pre-9/11 self by reviving his poker

13

obsession as surrogate reality. For Keith, going back to poker

means re-experiencing his life in familiar terms, which let him

forget the trauma. Yet DeLillo denies him the escape within the

novel by making the narrative of Falling Man cyclical in a

Beckettian fashion. Keith’s future is the comfort of his past;

but the past where DeLillo takes him is that moment in a World

Trade Center office, when he has to face the incredible

revelation that the past cannot be replayed: his poker partner,

Rumsey, is sitting “in his chair, head to one side,” holding a

coffee mug fragment in his hand, dead (241). Keith’s future in

DeLillo is to forever return to where he started in Chapter 1:

get the briefcase, walk out of the tower.

As a work of fiction, Falling Man allows, legalizes, and,

furthermore, thematizes such time deviations. The development of

Hammad’s storyline in the flashback sections of each Part of the

novel towards turning it into a narrative cycle is yet another

example. Others are not so much about the way time is narrated in

Falling Man, as they are attributes of individual concepts of time,

where the characters show a freedom of reordering chronological

sequences akin to the one enjoyed by the novelist. Keith does not

14

believe, but Florence does, if not recalls, that a certain plan

for them to meet preconditioned the attacks. Another modification

of such “false memories” is observed by Lianne, who, unlike her

husband, is a thorough self-analyst. Her experience of 9/11

includes watching Keith and their son Justin, both of whom

develop a great deal of estrangement. In addition, what she

notices about herself is the easiness she shares with many other

people in ascribing prophetic qualities to various artifacts

preceding September 11. In Chapter 2, “three days after the

planes,” Lianne finds a photo of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam book cover

on the postcard that her friend and occasional employer, Carol,

sent from Rome “a week or two earlier” to reach the addressee

right around the day of the attacks (8). Before interpreting it

as “a matter of simple coincidence,” Lianne experiences “the

first taut seconds” of thinking otherwise, suspending that

“simple” knowledge of the truth, failing to believe the obvious

coincidence. She cannot help finding prophecies of 9/11 in her

habitual environment, such as the two Morandi still lifes on her

mother’s wall, whose mystery and ominous “latent meanings” she

perceives, as she always has, at the end of the same chapter, and

15

which her mother’s lover, supposedly European ex-terrorist, helps

her interpret in Chapter 4:

“I’m looking at these objects, kitchen objects but

removed from the kitchen, free of the kitchen, the

house, everything practical and functioning. And I must

be back in another time zone. I must be even more

disoriented than usual after a long flight,” he said,

pausing. “Because I keep seeing the towers in this

still life.” (49)

To find herself “in another time zone,” Lianne does not need

to have flown: “She saw what he saw. She saw the towers.” She is

once again introduced to a piece of prophecy by Carol in Chapter

8, this time in the form of a book by “[a] retired aeronautical

engineer” they call Unaflyer, who has “been working obsessively

for fifteen or sixteen years” on what is now a “beast” of “all

facts, maps and schedules” (139). Lianne longs to line-edit it,

because her friend says it “seems to predict what happened”

(138).

16

In a tradition including Shelley, but by far exceeding the

boundaries of Romanticism, art has long been entrusted with a

prophetic function always questioned by the skeptical notion of

“simple coincidence,” or too much interpretative freedom. With

his earlier preoccupation with terrorism and catastrophe themes,

DeLillo himself is often said to have been writing 9/11 fiction

long before 9/11 (Thurschwell 278-81, Velcic 406-7). His peculiar

sense of living “in the future” before the September 2001 is

metaphorically, if not metaphysically, justified. What is

normally neglected in such discussions is the linguistic nature

of fictional reality, which makes it a mental simulator of

empirical experience among other media, such as the press, TV,

film, videogames, the Internet, etc. What in reality is time, in

fiction is just tense, a mere grammar of linguistic signals of

temporal relations. Therefore, in his interviews, DeLillo claims

no prophecy, but only artistry, and suggests it is “time and

loss,” and not experience, that is the subject matter of his

books (“Interview”).

In Falling Man, Lianne is exposed to a theory of time that has

a lot to do with fear, symmetrically to how, in DeLillo’s terms,

17

fictional narrative is compared to terrorism. It is Nina, her

mother, who articulates it, referring to the attacks: “Nothing is

next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago they

planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next.

This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to

be afraid. Too late now.” (10)

The temporal vector of fear is supposedly to the future, and

yet in fact it only points at the past, as obsolete as generals

preparing for a previous war. When Lianne learns that her

mother’s lover Martin Ridnour is most probably an ex-terrorist,

she views the time lapse again, as if life itself was a piece of

fiction, for which repetition and parallelism are normal devices.

Martin “thinks these people, these jihadists… have something in

common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies” (147);

moreover, a wanted poster of German terrorists from that time he

once showed Nina had nineteen faces, the number of 9/11

terrorists. Martin the art dealer, art critic and terrorist, with

no identity Lianne can be sure about, is a fictional personage

she encounters empirically; he is also another coincidence

demonstrating that there is no such thing as time. Under the

18

circumstances, her involvement as moderator of a group of

Alzheimer patients getting together for weekly storytelling

sessions is another chance she takes to investigate time lapses

in the loss of memory phenomenon. When one of the patients,

Rosellen S., has to give up the sessions, as she can no longer

remember her way home, her progressing loss of memory illustrates

where the counter-narrative is to finish. Lianne can foresee how

eventually oblivion will take her husband, who returned to family

after a long separation straight from the World Trade Center, but

whom she will lose in just a couple of years. The therapy of

storytelling is certainly not sufficient to reverse the progress

of the Alzheimer; similarly, approaching and re-experiencing 9/11

through counter-narrative is insufficient therapy, or no therapy

at all. In fact, curing yourself from the memory of September is

hardly desirable, in DeLillo’s terms. Lianne’s compassion with

her Alzheimer group, as well as with Keith, and her attitude to

such artifacts as Morandi paintings, Shelley postcard, Unaflyer

book, or Nina’s Martin, are meant to resist therapy. She is there

to attempt breaking such falsely therapeutic barriers as the one

that the kids, her son and his two friends she refers

19

collectively to as the Siblings, build in a linguistic game of

conspiring about their invented alias of bin Laden, “Bill

Lawton,” and his magic powers. For Lianne, empathy towards the

9/11 victims is so strong that her variant of Genette’s formula

is something like “[I imagine, and will you please] imagine [and

believe with me,] that [I was there when] the Twin Towers fell.”

Her imagination is to endlessly re-enter the pain instead of

removing it.

Multiplying individual character standpoints, DeLillo does

not let any of them dominate, not even Hammad’s inner perspective

of terrorist narrative closing each part of Falling Man: when the

terrorist act is committed in the end of the novel, as if it was

trying to do away with it and violently leave it in ruins,

DeLillo’s counter-narrative restarts. All characters’ narratives

are discredited as too primitive to cope with the incredible

experience, with none of the focalizers claiming to understand

and see how things really are; and yet they are all there: how

accurately they refer to experience is almost irrelevant.

However, there is a privileged case of mediation of experience by

20

a character, whose inner world is as inaccessible to the reader

as Amir’s, the novel’s only documentary character.

Performance artist David Janiak, known around DeLillo’s

fictional New York as Falling Man, is only exposed to the reader

through Lianne’s eyes. She witnesses two of his performances in

Parts 1 and 2, and in Part 3 reads his obituary and surfs the

fictional Internet for more information. In trying to come to

terms with his art, whose expressions appear to spectators

shocking and incredible, she repeatedly goes into the issue of

the artist’s intentions, although with no chance for

verification: unlike DeLillo, David Janiak never comments on his

work. As Lianne finds out, though, Janiak was trained in Moscow,

which presumably means in accordance with the Stanislavski method

centered on empathy and actor’s complete identification with

character, so that even “as a Brechtian dwarf” in a showcase

presentation Janiak “assaulted another actor, seemingly trying to

rip his tongue out during what was supposed to be a structured

improvisation” (233). Considering Bertolt Brecht’s method of

drama intended to keep both performers and spectators constantly

aware of the artificiality of stage action for the sake of its

21

rational message (Robinson 205-208), and thus opposite to the

Russian approach to theatre acting, such a notion may provide a

clue to Janiak’s art being the external, and much more

successful, equivalent of Lianne’s internal rejection of memory

loss therapy, in which storytelling is, like a poker game, a poor

substitution of reality. The past experience is irretrievable,

but art can make those who are exposed to it feel the shock,

fear, and loss in the presence of the falling towers. The

unexpectedness of Falling Man’s performances provides for the

suspension of belief effect (“I can’t believe it’s really

happening…”) simultaneous with its opposite (“…but it is! I have

to believe it! I’m not in the movies!”). Janiak’s audience cannot

suspend disbelief because they are not informed in advance about

the artistic nature of what they are watching. To compensate for

this deception, Falling Man ensures easy recognition of the

overtly artistic prototype of his show, once again shuffling

Brecht with Stanislavski.

Janiak’s three-year lasting series of accurate live

imitations of the famous work of both photojournalism and visual

art by Richard Drew (cf. Fitzpatrick 92-100), The Falling Man

22

photographic image first published in The New York Times on

September 12, 2001 is non-existent outside DeLillo’s fiction, but

it is elaborately rooted in at least four levels of

representation preceding it: onlookers’ immediate perception of

the real fall of the man later identified as Jonathan Briley; its

documentary fixation by Drew’s camera; the symbolism of the photo

seen by critics and all other interpreters reading it as art; and

the “disturbing” and controversial effect the photo itself had on

the public. Falling from various high-rise structures around New

York City with “a safety harness… barely visible” (33) and

assuming the pose of the man in the photo, David Janiak makes a

multiple act of fictionalization, taking the mediation of

experience several stages further on from Drew, and, at least for

an instant, enforcing a time lapse. In the physicality of his

fall, he internalizes Jonathan Briley, and makes his viewers

internalize the 9/11 primary witnesses’ shock (Stanislavski); the

disturbance is not at once removed when police escorts him out of

sight. Next, he externalizes it by hanging in the air, exposing

the harness and revealing the fall as fake, but still meaningful.

Stopping to believe that the fall was deathly and in that way

23

irreversible, the audience may now enter its serious implications

(Brecht). DeLillo prompts the same sequence to his reader:

although none of us had ever heard of such a performance artist

before the novel appeared, in our suspension of disbelief, no

matter how skeptical might John Searle have felt about it (321),

we may maintain a web search for David Janiak, to only find

references to the very text we are reading. However, this will be

an adequate response to the demands the novel lays on its

reader’s empathetic capacities.

For Lianne, and certainly even more so for DeLillo readers,

Falling Man’s obituary is another artifact in the line of his

shows, although it states that he did not manage to fulfill the

final jump, plans for which “did not include a safety harness”

(222). It is art’s authenticity that David Janiak measures; and

it is here that DeLillo leads his own reader through his multiple

narrative ruins, letting none of the complications around the

mediation of incredible experience and its deliberately fictional

version in the novel go from the story he has told.

Falling Man’s performance takes effect immediately, as

Lianne thinks in the attempt to deduce his intention (165). The

24

artist makes everyone feel the way the people felt, and, by

somatic instinct, do what they did on September 11. DeLillo’s

novel on the whole cannot count upon a similar effect, but still

it adds another level of mediation to David Janiak’s, and builds

itself upon it: that which invents David Janiak, for whom the

following version of the Genette formula might apply: “[I

pretend, as in fiction, and repeatedly perform so that you could]

imagine that [I was there when] the Twin Towers fell.”

Interestingly, in the novel’s post-9/11 reality Falling Man is

the only character whom DeLillo buries, and thereby completes.

For the rest of them, the counter-narrative will go on forever,

and the experience is to be repeated again and again.

Works Cited

DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.

- - -. “Intensity of a Plot: Marc Binelli Interviews Don

DeLillo.” Guernica Magazine July 2007: n.pag. Web. 21 Aug.

2011.

25

- - -. “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and

Loss in the Shadow of September.” Harper’s Magazine Dec. 2001:

33-40. Print.

- - -. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” PEN American Center. PEN

American Center, 2011. Web. 21 Aug. 2011.

Fitzpatrick, Andrea D. “The Movement of Vulnerability: Images of

Falling and September 11.” Art Journal 66.4 (2007): 84-102.

Print.

Genette, Gerard. Fiction & Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca

and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Print.

Robinson, Douglas. Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy,

Shklovsky, Brecht. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press,

2008. Print.

Searle, John. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New

Literary History 6.2 (1975): 319-32. Print.

Thurschwell, Adam. “Don DeLillo on the Task of Literature After

9/11.” Law and Literature 19.2 (2007): 277-302. Print.

Velcic, Vlatka. “Reshaping Ideologies: Leftists As

Terrorists/Terrorists As Leftists in DeLillo’s Novels.”

Studies in the Novel 36.3 (2004): 405-18. Print.

26