“Why do they hate us?” The motives behind terrorism in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and John Updike’s Terrorist

On the 20th of September 2001, Bush asked the inflammatory question that quickly became ubiquitous in national and global conversations about 9/11: “[w]hy do they hate us?”. The simplistic answer he provided focused on “their” hatred of “our” way of life – “the American way”: “They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other”. This brief characterization of the events, their causes, and the sides involved has potentially been the most significant framing of 9/11. This article explores two of the most iconic 9/11 novels addressing the topic of terrorism: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006). I analyze how the novels portray their terrorist characters’ motives – whether they arise from personal, religious, ideological, or historical reasons. Furthermore, this article draws connections between the novels’ portrayal and the dominant 9/11 discourse, which tended to rely on a binary worldview of good and evil, “clash of civilizations”, the idea that 9/11 came out of the blue, and the purported connection between Islam and terrorism. With this article, I critique the United States’ discursive response to 9/11 and argue that while literature would have had a great opportunity to complicate the discourse, it most commonly failed to do so.