DeLillo's Ignatian Moment: Religious Longing and Theological Encounter in Falling Man

Abstract

In his 2007 novel Falling Man, Don DeLillo depicts New York City, in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, as a place in which nearly everyone seems to be experiencing some form of religious longing. Still, for almost all of DeLillo's characters, religious longing remains disconnected from any formal religious practice or any community of faith. The most significant exception is the book's main character, Lianne Glenn, who struggles to return to Catholicism, partly through her memory of an encounter in college with the theology of Sèren Kierkegaard, partly through her work with a writing group of Alzheimer's patients, and partly through her memories of her father's rigidly traditional Catholicism. Lianne's discovery of a more questioning Catholicism continues the preoccupation in DeLillo's fiction with the struggle for spirituality and morality in a contemporary America. More specifically, it also clarifies the growing significance in his recent work of the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola.