For 25 years, stories told about the 9/11 terror attacks have grappled with questions of truth, reality and bearing witness to trauma.

9/11 was a highly visual event. The image of the plane hitting the second tower was played over and over on a loop. This repetition of the horror echoed the way trauma itself can be compulsively replayed, remembered or re-enacted by the people who experience it. Another image was captured but self-censored by American media outlets, after complaints by readers. The image, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, was of an unidentified man plunging to his death, preferring to fall rather than burn.

The endless framing of the attacks in the media is echoed in fiction that explores 9/11, including the importance of testimony and the ways we process trauma. A related theme, too, is the way the attacks changed life in America, especially for people of Pakistani or Arabic backgrounds.

These five important 9/11 novels all attempt to make meaning out of this suffering.

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) is perhaps the most famous work of 9/11 fiction. It was later adapted as a 2011 film starring Tom Hanks.

The traumatic concern with framing the moment of the disaster and its repetition is the primary symptom of nine-year-old Oskar Schell’s grief after the presumed death of his father in the 9/11 attacks. Struggling to comprehend the possibility of his father’s death, Oskar desperately searches for meaning in his now-upended world, following “clues” he believes will reveal his father’s final message to him.

Oskar artificially frames his experience through these clues, seeking to make sense out of meaningless fragments. After finding a scrap of paper which reads only “Black”, Oskar travels New York City, attempting to identify the Mr or Mrs Black the note refers to. He also creates a scrapbook, “Stuff that Happened to Me”, where he incorporates images and evidence of atrocities that have happened to others.

Both the search for the unknown person........

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