The Psychological Impact Of Terrorism In Contemporary Fiction: Trauma, Identity, And Precarious Belonging In Falling Man, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, And Home Fire

Abstract

This article examines the psychological impact of terrorism in three contemporary novels: Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017). Using trauma theory, supported by postcolonial approaches to trauma, the study investigates how terrorism affects memory, identity, interpersonal relationships, belonging, and perceptions of security. It argues that contemporary fiction represents terrorism not as an isolated episode of spectacular violence but as a continuing psychological and political condition. In Falling Man, the survivor's compulsive return to the attack, emotional withdrawal, and disturbed domestic life demonstrate the delayed and repetitive structure of trauma. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the attacks of September 11 intensify Changez's divided identity and expose the racial suspicion underlying his conditional acceptance in the United States. Home Fire extends the inquiry to a British Muslim family affected by inherited stigma, radicalization, state surveillance, citizenship deprivation, grief, and public hostility. A comparative qualitative reading shows that psychological suffering arises both from terrorist violence and from the social responses that follow it. Fear, securitization, racialization, and exclusion turn trauma into a shared yet unequal experience. The selected novels also reveal the ethical value of fiction: by shifting attention from official narratives and public spectacle to private consciousness, family life, and morally complicated subjects, fiction resists simple divisions between victim and perpetrator. The article concludes that trauma theory remains useful for reading terrorism fiction, but it must be widened through postcolonial criticism so that historical power, migration, race, citizenship, and state policy remain central to the analysis