Don DeLillo's Falling Man is a prime example of ring composition. Time does not progress in a linear fashion, or even using flashbacks and other devices to move backward and forward (like, for instance, Slaughterhouse-Five, another book structured around an atrocity), in this book. Instead, Falling Man circles its main event, the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001, bringing the reader back to that point.

The book therefore ends just where it begins: with its protagonist, Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who worked at the World Trade Center, wandering the streets of New York dazed and bleeding, having narrowly escaped from the attack. DeLillo ends the book in this way to show the impossibility of moving on from such a cataclysmic event. All the characters in the novel attempt to move on and move forward in time, but they are brought back, full circle, to the day that changed America forever.