Labyrinth Of Language:Significance Of Repetition And Indeterminacy In Don Delillo’s Falling Man

Crowned as "the defining work of 9/11 fiction," Don DeLillo’s Falling Man is an artistic re-creation of the 9/11 terrorist attack in the post-9/11 period.Rather than a mechanic tautology or a mimetic replica of the event,Falling Man is a repetition with indeterminacy and heterogeneity.Fraught with a sense of indeterminacy,the novel presents a postmodern background intrinsic of indeterminacy,slippery language,suspended characters,ambiguous art,et cetera.Such an indeterminacy chiefly results from heterogeneous repetitions presented in the novel.By virtue of repetition and language,both characteristic of variety and indeterminacy,Falling Man re-presents and re-constructs the historical event artistically so as to diversify the official discourse of 9/11 which is based on unicity and determinacy.It is the indeterminacy that furnishes the novel with possibilities,thereby preventing it from being simply labeled as an unredeemable trauma or a therapeutic panacea.This thesis attempts a Millerian interpretation on the repetitions in Falling Man.In the light of J.Hillis Miller’s heterogeneous hypothesis of repetitions and deconstructive episteme,along with Ihab Hassan’s and other critics’ studies on postmodernism,this thesis intends to explore the repetition and its intrinsic indeterminacy in DeLillo’s 9/11 novel.In avoidance of labelling or categorizing the novel,the focus of the thesis lies on the "how" of meaning rather than on its "what," not "what is the meaning?" but how is the sense of indeterminacy is produced by various forms of repetition in Falling Man,and how does the meaning arise from the encounter with these repetitions? Consequently,it unravels Falling Man’s indeterminacy that it is not merely a book of trauma or a redemptive allegory.Rather the heterogeneous repetitions make indeterminate Falling Man where coexist multiple and even contradictory meanings.Therefore,by means of analyzing the repetition and its indeterminacy in Falling Man,this thesis aims to unveil that DeLillo repeats and re-constructs the historical 9/11 event with differences,thereby interrogating and challenging the monotony of settled views on history.Falling Man resists providing a determinate resolution to traumas or pre-setting a definite way to respond to traumatic history.Instead,it opens a variety of types of discourse and creates different possibilities to ruminate history,to rethink traumas,and to recalibrate everything after 9/11,via DeLillo’s artistic language,the fountainhead of indeterminacy and the heterogeneous repetitions in Falling Man.