Gambling: Reality versus Game Gambling. An activity that involves risk and risk taking. In Don Delillo’s Falling Man novel, Keith is a broken man who gets over the haunting, shocking, and nerve numbing events he experienced on the day of the 9/11 attack. He recounts these events vaguely and distantly, thinking about them in his head as if they weren’t especially important or relevant to him. He acts as a bystander to his own experience and looks onto his experience as if he was a third party observer. Keith’s nature to do this extends to his obsessively strong inclination and urge to play poker. In order to avoid the events of reality, Keith numbs himself by separating his conscious in the real world and teleporting it into the gambling world in which he can concentrate on the virtual world of gambling. Gambling plays a crucial role in Delillo’s novel by separating Keith’s identity in the real world and replacing it with an alternate identity in the game of poker. The first instance of the audience being introduced to Keith’s obsession with gambling is when Keith revisits his apartment building that is in danger of collapsing. The audience wonders why Keith is so desperate to get to the building, as he had to go through multiple layers of security guards and policemen, showing his ID and a fabricated story to gain sympathy, “there were cats he had to feed, three of them, and if they died his children would be devastated and he showed the splint on his arm.” (Delillo 24) As we step into Keith’s old residence, we find that he is not particularly interested in anything in the room, except for the poker table that catches his attention. Moving with Keith’s train of thought, we find that he admits and realizes what the poker table symbolizes to him, “it was the one uncomplicated interval of his week, his month, the poker game - the one anticipation that was not marked by the bloodguilt tracings of severed connections.” No matter if the table was “felt or baize,” (Delillo 27) Keith knows that poker has nothing to do with the severed connections he has with his estranged wife, Lianne. Poker is an uncluttered activity that is irrelevant to the conditions of the bitter reality, both of his broken relationship and the accident, he has undergone. Poker does not require him to think about any connections or events in reality in order to play the game. While engaged in the game of poker, Keith takes on an alternate role, an alternate identity, that has a different set of ambitions and motivations that govern himself compared to the harsh reality that forces him to take on his true identity in life. This detachment with reality shows in Keith’s everyday interactions with the real world. He is ordinary, laid back, and otherwise uninterested in anything involved in the real world while he gets really into poker and finds it enjoyable and interesting to engage in. For example, during his musical therapy session, he could not focus on the music itself, being unable to distinguish the flutes from the clarinets and instead, have his mind wander to think of a prostitute he once met, “Nancy, what’s-her-name, briefly, between incidental sex acts” and of what the radiologist said in her Russian accent, “once it’s over, you forget instantly the whole experience so how bad can it be.” (Delillo 18) In Keith’s having to engage in reality under his still traumatized, shocked state, he repels the radiologist’s assurance as a “description of dying” (Delillo 19). To add to the unconvinced attitude of Keith’s, he also views negatively the entire physical task of lying on the ‘long narrow table within the closed unit” as a ordeal that screamed “helpless confinement.” In this way, Keith is trying to avoid facing the components of reality by repelling everything that even remotely puts him in touch with what happened during the accident.
In addition to repelling them consciously, Keith also repels reality subconsciously whenever he awakens from his shock and begins to function more like he did in the past before the accident happened, “The ordinariness, so normally unnoticeable, fell upon him oddly, with almost a dreamlike effect.” (Delillo 51) When Keith went out for a walk in the park at Engineer’s Gate with the objective of returning the suitcase to Florence, he observes and sees three girls in the neighborhood rollerblading, and immediately wants to turn back. He cannot accept or integrate himself into the same life he had before the accident happened, because doing so causes him discomfort. Poker, however, allows him to avoid and block out all of those experiences.
In “The Experience of Play,” Gerda Reith brings up one of the main characteristics of gambling, the notion of it being a ‘peculiar character’ characterized by their extreme separateness from everyday life. Reith says that it is both a ‘temporal and spatial’ (Reith 257) separateness, signaling the experience of gambling, the experience of game and play, to be something both dreamlike and mimicking reality. Although Keith does not describe his experience of gambling to the reader, we can see from his positive attitude towards gambling and how they serve as fond memories of his when he reminisces of the past that he is caught in this middlestate of reality involving both imaginative and realistic elements. A fellow gambler to Keith, Huizinga, describes it as, “a stepping out of “real life” into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” in which there is a crossing of both one’s physical and mental self from the ordinary, real world into the world of play. In the same way, Goffman describes the experience as a world in which one is allowed to build their own activities, a “field for fateful, dramatic action, a plane of being, an engine of meaning, a world in itself, different from all other worlds.” (Reith 257) Just as the real world is governed by its own set of independent rules and customs in which we all abide by, the world of game is set on its own independent rules that in turn, makes the player gain a different set of motivation separate from their motivations in the ordinary world.
The separateness described in Reith’s “Experience of Play” in which a poker player steps from the realm of reality into the world of play is displayed in Keith when he enters the casino in downtown Race and Sports Book and when he actually sits down to play poker upon entering the casino. Initially, when he entered the casino, Keith knows, “it was 8 a.m.” and he is the only one who knows this, as everyone else, such as the “old man with a white ponytail” (Delillo 188) who sat anxiously watching horses in mid race, is oblivious to the time of day. The old man is transfixed on the outcome of the horserace and leans motionless with his “body english that marks money on the line” concentrating on glowing screen.
As Keith sits down, he yet again observes that he knows the “time and day of week.” At this point, when Keith sits down and prepares to start a game, the transition stage of leaving reality and stepping into the world of poker is expressed in his thoughts of wondering when the “time and day of week, such scraps of data, would begin to feel disposable.” (Delillo 189) Normally, the time, day of week, and basic everyday knowledge like this would be essential to the everyday man living in reality; however, it is not to the gambler. As Keith prepares himself to embark on the game route, he fully realizes that as soon as he engulfs himself in the game, he will not know the time and day of week anymore as those are now irrelevant pieces of information as he drops his real identity and assumes his alternate identity in the game world. When Keith walks into the deserted poker room, he senses life in the few other players occupying the room, signifying his positivity and attraction towards gambling. He watches a woman across the table from him and describes her physical features, but does not “wonder who she was or where she’d go when this was over.” (Delillo 189) Keith is now mostly integrated with his alternate identity who does not care about what the woman does or who she is, because she has no influence or relevance to the game he is about to play. “There was nothing outside the game but faded space,” ergo the woman is of no interest to her, neither is anything else in the casino room except for the actual game itself.
In Don Delillo’s novel Falling Man, gambling is set as the main obsession surrounding Keith. Although Keith does not expressedly detail how it makes him feel or describe the role of gambling to him directly, we observe through his behavior and attitude towards memories of playing poker as one that is more positive and well reminisced compared to those of the events of the accident that happened in real life. In this way, Keith tries to use gambling as a distractant to detach himself from reality and block out the bad memories he has of both his past relationships and connections with people and those of his traumatizing accident. Gambling fulfills a critical role in Don Delillo’s Falling Man by separating Keith’s identity into his real identity and his alternate identity to which he escapes to in the poker world.

Works Cited
DeLillo, Don. Falling Man: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2007. Print.
Reith, Gerda. "The Experience of Play." The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture.
London: Routledge, 1999. Print.