Don DeLillo's Falling Man as Cultural Trauma Fiction.

This article examines Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel *Falling Man* as a work of Cultural Trauma Fiction, a subgenre that explores the effects of large-scale traumatic events on collective cultural identity rather than focusing solely on individual trauma. Using the sociological concept of cultural trauma, which emphasizes how traumatic events reshape group consciousness and cultural memory, the article situates 9/11 as a limit event that produced widespread cultural trauma mediated through mass media. *Falling Man* is analyzed for its multivocal narrative that includes diverse perspectives—such as survivors, terrorists, and indirect witnesses—and its engagement with ethical questions about representing trauma, particularly through the motif of a performance artist reenacting the falling victims of 9/11. The novel challenges dominant, reductive narratives by humanizing multiple identities, addressing collective anxieties about memory and memorialization, and constructing counternarratives that complicate and enrich the cultural understanding of 9/11’s impact.