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Abstract
This paper tries to highlight Don DeLillo’s attempt to bring to surface the trauma Americans went through after the event of 9/11 by employing the rhetorical device of Ekphrasis. Just when America revelled in its digital revolution a group of men aboard in one of the American planes hit the towers on the morning of the ninth of November 2001. A vast opus of works has piled up in response to the event. DeLillo’s novel as a novel on 9/11 is an account of his reflections on terror, media, as well as the role he assigns to artists in a world which is absolutely depended on the constructed stories by the media. This paper also explores DeLillo’s attempt to understand and to show why a catastrophe like 9/11 befell seemingly invincible America. The novel, apart from being an illustrative work of aesthetic acumen, is also a DeLillo’s deliberation on what America did to incite such a catastrophe. DeLillo seems to recognize the dilemma of an American fiction writer to respond critically to such a catastrophe while maintaining an unbiased and objective approach. He believes that a writer has a moral responsibility while understanding such an event. He seems to recommend that these acts of terrorism are a way of resistance against the pervasive cultural and political influence of the west over rest of the world, the Middle East, particularly.