The physical and emotional trauma that Keith Neudecker, the protagonist of Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), sustains as a victim of the 9/11 terror attack on the World Trade Center essentially propels the emergence of a metaphorical body where repetitive patterns of various sounds – the noises of the attack as well as key phrases reverberating in internal and external speech – prove to be his sole anchor after conventional medicine only triggers his anxiety. While undergoing a medical procedure following the attack, Keith conjures up a morbid association that emphasises both his detachment from his body and his struggle with the saturation of sound, but also his disillusion or disbelief in the medical establishment:

In fact, Keith's initial struggle to reconcile his status as a survivor of the 9/11 attack is depicted through his physical injury within the context of an alienating hospital setting – ‘There were people on gurneys and there were others, a few, in wheelchairs, and he had trouble writing his name and more trouble fastening the hospital gown behind him.’ The medical procedures are also described in neutral terms from Keith's shell-shocked perspective, as if he were a ghost-focaliser, observing his physical body rather than existing within it:

The metaphorical body of sound emerges in reaction to Keith's corporeal estrangement and ongoing state of sensory overload; both of these phenomena are triggered by the attack as well as by the medical treatments Keith endures following his survival.