Assignment 4.1 My Preliminary Observations of “The Falling Man” by Tom Junod

1.    The details that stood out for me was the hauntingly mesmerizing photograph of the falling man.  It’s seemingly unreal and thus retouched and/or photographically fabricated enhanced appearance clearly becomes unforgettable when it is realized that this was but a single frame within the fall of a man that took his life horribly.  Interestingly enough, this fall in reality had to have taken on many positions of this man’s’ body as it turned over and over in many detailed positions before smashing helplessly to the ground.  Yet this one most eerie frame isolated is profound in its visually capturing the release of an individual struggle to survive and acceptance of meeting his death seemingly, unafraid and almost composed.

2.   Junod appears to have literary originality in his most untraditional type style of separating each of his sections of writing like individual vignette-like short essays depicting brief differing scenes and varying individual viewpoints and evaluations of what was being viewed in horror to utter disbelief.  This factor of disbelief to a very real horror going on in reality was expressively described by Junod when he wrote, “The resistance to the image - - to the images - - started early, started immediately, started on the ground.  A mother whispering to her distraught child a consoling lie: “Maybe they’re just birds, honey” (Junod 72). 

3.   The factor that seemed to me to be most unusual and not seeming to fit the pattern of Junod’s other writing segments was the very last one, which reveals the difficulty in finding the true identity of the falling man.  Whereas, Junod’s prior segments were soundly factored on what actually transpired, the falling man in the end remains largely unidentified after so many families and individuals were asked if they knew him.  And so the falling man becomes the surprising enigma to this most reported, studied, controversial and unforgettable national tragedy that turned out to be the catalyst that prompted the United States invading Iraq and commencing in a 10-year war that will now finally end this December, 2011.