​By. Tim Combes

​“If You Believe It, I Believe It”: Finding Faith in Uncertainty in DeLillo’s Falling Man

            The primary dilemma of being human is this: we require certainty in a world that does not freely offer it to us. Even the most faithful members of a religion experience doubt. Even the most staunch atheists sometimes gave upon the stars and wonder if maybe there is a God. If any absolute meaning exists in the universe, it is utterly unknowable— or, at least, not widely agreed upon. And a lack of absolute meaning requires men and women to construct their own. This fact of life lies at the core of Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man. While the novel is centered around the events of September 11th, it is primarily about the ways in which its three main characters—Keith, Lianne, and Hammad—struggle to create structure out of life’s uncertainty.

            Even before being traumatized by the events of 9/11, Keith lacked a strong emotional center due to unfulfilled desires. In a conversation with Florence, he talks about how he once gave himself a year to pursue an acting career but quit after a mere two months and decided to go to law school instead. He made this choice not out of a desire to be a lawyer, but rather, as he puts it, because “‘what else? Where else?” (DeLillo 89). Later, Lianne theorizes openly to Keith that the root of his unfulfilled desires lies in him wanting to kill somebody. She is not fully convinced that this is the correct diagnosis, but knows that there is some deep-seated craving inside of Keith that is not being satiated: “it was in his skin, maybe just a pulse at the side of his forehead, the faintest cadence in a small blue vein. [Lianne] knew there was something that had to be satisfied, a matter discharged in full, and she thought this was at the heart of his restlessness” (DeLillo 214). His traumatic experiences in the World Trade Center on 9/11 only compounded this already present restlessness.

            Hammad deals with a similar lack of fulfillment, but its genesis is left more vague. DeLillo describes him as “a bulky man, clumsy, and thought all his life that some unnamed energy was sealed in his body, too tight to be released” (79). Little is given in the way of explaining how Hammad came to be involved in the 9/11 terrorist plot, but it’s very likely that his reasons for joining are related to this sealed energy. Perhaps, unlike Keith, he is able to realize that the best way to expel this energy lies in murder. However, it is more likely that this unexpelled energy is symbolic of him wanting to make a mark on the world. “[Hammad] had to fight against the need to be normal. He had to struggle against himself, first, then against the injustice that haunted their lives” (DeLillo 83). Hammad genuinely wants to make a difference. Unfortunately, the injustices—which DeLillo leaves vague—he has dealt with throughout his life pushed him toward Islamic extremism rather than something constructive.

            Lianne lacks an emotional center in her life due to the suicide of her father, Jack. In the wake of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Jack chose to end his own life rather than slowly lose his brain to the disease. Lianne was only twenty-two when it happened and struggled to cope in its aftermath: “she tried to tell herself he’d done a brave thing. It was way too soon. There was time before the disease took solid hold but Jack was always respectful of nature’s little fuck ups and figured the deal was sealed” (DeLillo 41). She is torn emotionally by his decision. On one hand, she respects his ability to read between the lines and his resolve to not let the disease take him alive. On the other hand, there was still meaningful time left that they could have spent together. This unresolved tension continues to affect her well into her adulthood.

            Lianne’s involvement in the Alzheimer’s group is borne out of a desire to resolve this tension, to construct meaning out of her father’s suicide. She makes this realization herself after being reminded by Dr. Apter that the Alzheimer’s group is for the patients, not her: “it was possible that the group meant more to her than it did to the members. There was something precious here, something that seeps and bleeds. These people were the living breath of the thing that killed her father” (DeLillo 62). To Lianne, Jack’s death lacks meaning. He developed a terrible disease at random and killed himself as a reaction to that randomness. Lianne needs the Alzheimer’s patients in her life to feel that her father’s death was not completely meaningless. If she can construct something good in response to his death, she is therefore constructing meaning out of it; she is creating a world in which his death was not for nothing.

           Hammad becomes an Islamic extremist as his own way of making sense of the world. Hammad’s internal struggle with his beliefs are depicted soon after the reader first encounters him. Upon hearing one of his fellow jihadis blaming everything from thin walls to cramped toilets on the Jews, Hammad does not know how to react. “Hammad wasn’t sure if this was funny true or stupid. He listened to everything they said, intently” (DeLillo 79). Throughout the same chapter, Hammad is also described as secretly masturbating and having sexual relations with a woman he is not married to—two things that are heavily frowned upon by fundamentalist Muslims (DeLillo 80-82). The leader of his group, Amir (known infamously to the world as Mohamed Atta), soon rebukes Hammad for these sinful behaviors. Rather than causing him to feel alienated, this rebuke instead leads to Hammad doubling down on his commitment to his brethren: “there were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defined. He was becoming one of them now, learning to look like them and think like them. This was inseparable from jihad” (DeLillo 83). For all of his doubts, the comradery and structure he gets from jihad, or struggle, with his brothers gives his life order. It is important to note that throughout the entirety of the chapter, Allah is not mentioned once. This seems to be an intentional choice by DeLillo to emphasise how Hammad’s actions are less about his faith than they are about his religion (the rituals making up Islam).

            DeLillo uses the game of poker as a symbol for how Keith choses to deal with the randomness of life. Three years after 9/11, Keith’s thought process toward poker is described as such:

               The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice.

              Luck, chance, no one knew what these things were. These things were only assumed to 

              affect events. He had memory, judgement, the ability to decide what is true, what is

             alleged, when to strike, when to fade. . . the game had structure, guiding principles,

               sweet and easy interludes of dream logic when the player knows that the card he needs

              is the card that’s sure to fall (DeLillo 211-212).

In a world that Keith cannot understand—a world that is random, horrific, and unfair—poker gives him a sense of having agency over the world. This is why he leaves his family for weeks on end to play poker; he needs it in order to function. Fatherhood requires a certain level of emotional centeredness, something Keith lacks without poker.

            That being said, it would be wrong to categorize Keith as a gambling addict—at least in the traditional sense. Keith needs poker to function, yes, but this compulsion has nothing to do with gambling. This distinction is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, although he enjoys watching them, Keith never bets on horse races. He sees an important difference between the nature of horse racing and poker: “call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are. It belonged to him, this yes or no, not to a horse running in the mud somewhere in New Jersey” (DeLillo 212). Keith does not gamble on games in which the gambler does not have an active role. This would. therefore, also include: slot machines, craps, roulette, the lottery, and sporting events. His experiences on September 11th stole from Keith whatever little understanding he had over his role in life and his ability to affect its outcome. To bet on events that he has no control over would only compound these feelings. In contrast, Keith being able to effectively read his opponents, evaluate his own hand, and make strategic moves to win a game of five-card draw is a microcosm for him learning manage the unpredictability of life.

             Keith also uses poker as a coping mechanism in the same way that many people do with organized religion. Keith first begins hosting weekly poker games at his apartment as a means of dealing with pain, namely his separation from Lianne. “Their separation had been marked by a certain symmetry, the steadfast commitment each made to an equivalent group. He had his poker game, six players, downtown, once a week” (DeLillo 29). Years later, after his experiences on September 11th, Keith begins travel around the country, playing poker at various casinos, spending increasing amounts of time away from his family. Keith clings to poker as a means of healing and centering after his traumatic experiences, just like many people do with religion. Terry Cheng, one of Keith’s former poker buddies, even makes a similar comparison: “‘There’s a game started in Los Angeles. Same thing, stud and draw. Younger crowd. Like early Christians in hiding. Think about it’” (DeLillo 203). While Terry is not attempting to make a point about coping here, DeLillo includes this as a subtle way to draw the reader to the connection between poker and religion.

             In fact, the chapter detailing Keith and his poker buddies’ escalating rules surrounding their poker nights can be seen as allegorical for the ways in which religious attitudes can begin to manifest in people. When the poker nights first began, Keith and his friends could do whatever they pleased: play whichever games they desired, eat whichever junk foods their cravings demanded, and drink whatever alcohol they set their hearts on. Quickly, however, they began to establish rules. First, they limited their game options to only five-card stud and five-card draw, and then they began to make rules about food. “How disciplined can we be, Demetrius said, if we are taking time to leave the table and stuff our jaws with chemically treated bread, meats, and cheeses” (DeLillo 97). After this, they decide to only drink dark liquors and one specific brand of dark German beer, and ban sports talk entirely, all on the altar of making “structure out of willful trivia” (DeLillo 97). Eventually, they limit their games to only five-card stud, but needlessly continue to announce the game before they play it, as a sort of “proud ritual” (DeLillo 99). Each time they introduce a new rule, DeLillo makes certain to mention that said rule is initially brought up as a joke. This mirrors the ways in which religious attitudes tend to take hold of and bastardize thought processes that begin as genuine faith. If God can be understood by man, then that suggests he is man made. If a true God exists, if there is an entity that is so far above man that he was able to create them, then he is by definition incomprehensible. But man is wired with a need to comprehend; one needs a certain amount of structure in order to feel secure, even if he or she knows on some level that that structure is a facade.

             Similarly, the narrowness of the jihadis’ worldview shields them from the tougher, more existential questions over their role in life. Soon before the attacks, Hammad comes to terms with sacrificing himself but begins to question the morality of taking the lives of so many “others.” He finds the courage to question Amir about this, and his response is striking: “Amir said simply there are no others. The others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them. This is their function as others. Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying. Hammad was impressed by this. It sounded like philosophy” (DeLillo 176). Rather than face the evilness of what they are about to do, the jihadis surround themselves with a rigid worldview that distances them from the guilt and conviction they would otherwise be feeling. As convenient as it is to think otherwise, the men who planned 9/11 were just as human as anybody else. In order to commit an act as heinous as the September 11th attacks, he or she must find a way to disconnect from empathy. Their plan was a tightrope walk, and their narrow worldview was the focal point keeping them from falling into the abyss.

             In this way, Keith and his poker buddies are not completely dissimilar to Hammad and the jihadis. Take this quote, for example: “They played it safe and regretted it, took risks and lost, fell into states of utter gloom. But there were always things to ban and rules to make” (DeLillo 99). In context, this quote is describing Keith’s poker nights. However, out of context, it could just as easily be describing Hammad and his fellow jihadis. The rigidity of the poker night rules acted as an ironic source of comfort for the ups and downs of poker. The highly defined nature of the rules counterbalanced the relative unpredictability of poker in the same way that the jihadis’ narrow worldview counterbalanced the immorality of their actions. This connection is further illustrated by the subconscious guilt that the poker group feels once they abandon their rules: “they tried not to wonder what four other players would think of them, in this wallow of wild-man poker, tombstone to tombstone in Cologne” (DeLillo 100). The “four other players” mentioned refers to a group of poker-playing friends in Germany who were so entrenched in their decades-long poker nights that they chose to be buried together in the same configuration as they sat at their card table. The reverence with which the poker group treats these men is akin to the respect Hammad has to the martyrs of the Ayatollah (DeLillo 238). While DeLillo never directly spells this out, one can imagine that Hammad would feel similar guilt of betrayal to the martyrs if he were to back out from the plan. These religious connections were by no means unintentional by DeLillo. Scholars have written at length about Falling Man’s religious undertones: “In this subterranean way—and also more explicitly than any of DeLillo's previous books—Falling Man becomes a religious novel. More specifically, it becomes an extended meditation on the possibilities or impossibilities of religious belief” (Conniff 48).

            Neither Keith nor Hammad fully come to terms with life’s randomness. At the novel’s chronological conclusion, Keith is no closer to filling the whole at the center of his life than he was at the beginning. He is in some random casino, away from his wife and child, doing wrist exercises that are no longer beneficial to him: “he did the full program every time, hand raised, forearm flat, hand down, forearm sideways . . . drawing it out, making it last. He counted the seconds, counted the repetitions” (DeLillo 236). Keith doing these complicated exercises long after necessary is representative of his inability to move on in life. He is unable to let go of the exercises just like he is unable to let go his inherent restlessness, even as it drives him further and further apart from the only living people that truly care about him. Hammad, meanwhile, is long dead by this point in the novel’s timeline. Admittedly, there is an argument to be made that perhaps he was right, and that he is in paradise at the novel’s conclusion. Regardless of the whether or not that is true, Hammad’s response to life’s randomness and injustice—that is, killing himself and many others—can only be said to represent him coming to terms with his death, not his life. He was unable to handle life, so he chose to give it up in a horrifying act of violence. Anyone can die for something; it is much harder to live for something.

             Lianne is the only character in the novel who is able to come to terms with the randomness of life. This is demonstrated in an interaction she as with Martin, her late mother’s lover, toward the end of the novel. It is hinted throughout the book that Martin, which is not his real name, was potentially once involved in a terrorist group in Germany. Nina, Lianne’s mother, was unable to handle this possibility after the events of 9/11. She was unable to disassociate him from the men that flew the planes into the World Trade Center, and this uncertainty may very well have sped up the rate of her already declining health. Lianne, however, has a different reaction to this uncertainty:

             she respected his secret, yielded to his mystery. Whatever it was he’d done, it was

             not outside the lines of response. She could imagine his life, then and now, detect

             the slurred pulse of an earlier consciousness. 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)

Lianne is able to “yield to [Martin’s] mystery” in a way that Nina never could. This ability to be content with not knowing demonstrates that Lianne has learned how to properly handle the randomness of life. That is, she has realized that she will never be able to fit life inside a neatly organized box, so she has decided not to even try. This newfound emotional centeredness is further demonstrated by her coming to terms with Keith’s prolonged absences: “she was ready to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, the way they were before the planes appeared that day, silver crossing blue” (DeLillo 236). She has come to the point where she will allow Keith to figure out whatever he feels he needs to; his contentment, or lack thereof, no longer has any bearing on her own.

                  The one silver lining for all of the characters still searching for meaning at the novel’s conclusion lies in an often repeated phrase throughout its pages: “if you believe it, I believe it” (DeLillo 216). This phrase, or some variation of it, is uttered countless times throughout the book, and holds the key to the meaning and order that all of the characters are searching for. It is symbolic of the meaning people can find within each other, within the people they love most. It is both is the reason why Keith came back to Lianne on September 11th, and the reason he cheats on her with Florence. In the wake of such a terrible event, the only source of truth that holds any weight is that which lies within another person. It may not be intrinsic truth, it may be an opinion, a shared feeling, or a mere touch or moment of eye contact, but it is the truth that binds people. If Keith could only realize this fact, maybe he would be able to come home for good. Lianne was right when she said Keith needed to kill somebody: he needs to kill himself. But not in the same way Hammad did—not in a physical way at all. Rather, Keith needs to kill his sense of self. He must put his restlessness and his ambition aside and come home to his son, who is growing up too fast, and his wife, who is at that very moment realizing that she does not need him.

                                                                                        Works Cited

Conniff, Brian. “DeLillo's Ignatian Moment: Religious Longing and Theological Encounter in Falling Man.”

            Christianity & Literature, vol. 63, no. 1, 2013, pp. 47–73., doi:10.1177/014833311306300106.

DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. Scribner, 2007.