Category: White Noise

The technique is the means by which the writer’s experience, which is his subject matter, compels him to attend to it; technique is the only means he has of discovering, exploring, developing his subject, of conveying its meaning, and, finally, evaluating it. (Shorter 18)

Analysing the narrative structure of the works provide an interconnection between the formal and thematic function of the novel. Fiction provides a distinctively narrative means of countering the loss of individual, meaningful experience so often associated with the ahistorical, simulacral, and absurdly ironic nature of postmodernity. DeLillo is considered as one of the important writers of the twentieth century. Many critics has seen his work as exemplifying novels which examine the present sociocultural condition offered by Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson and Jean- Francois Lyotard, so casting it as Postmodern prototype.

Although Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise boosts no formal ending in terms of plot resolution, it manages to achieve a high sense of narrative closure. The novel ends with a short chapter that runs counter to the narrative demands of plot logic and reader’s expectations. After a long and surrealistic chapter in which the main character Professor Jack Gladney attempt to murder the scientist Willie Mink for seducing his wife Babette and, subsequently, experiences a nightmarish series of adventures in Germantown, the novel ends with a short, epiphany-like chapter which comprises three narrative vignettes that are in complete discontinuity with the narrative sequence of Jack’s plot.

The murder chapter leaves Jack exhausted and concludes on his authorial-like tongue that: “There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze.” (2) The final chapter that follows immediately does not fulfil this prophetic promise for it starts vigorously with a new narrative that concerns the highway bike adventure of Babette’s five-year old son Wilder. This narrative does not only distance itself temporally from that of the murder scene but also creates a deliberate sequential ambivalence: “This was the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle …” (322). While this rhetorical initio mimics the openings of the classic folkloric adventure tales it breaks down the line of linear narrative progression Jack’s narrative tries to create throughout the text. The reader can never be sure whether this happened after or before the murder narrative.

The same textual tactics are employed with the second narrative episodes in the final chapter. The intensity of Wilder’s adventure which arouses in the reader a high sense of fear and expectations after the manner of classical tragedy suddenly give way to the tranquillity of the sunset scene: “We go to the overpass all the time. Babette, Wilder and I.” (324). The absence of transition and cohesion markers between these two narratives shakes further the reader’s sense of plot progression. Self and community intrude to disrupt this sense of tranquillity that nature provides momentarily: “Men in Mylex suits are still in the area” (325) undermines the both the narrator’s sense of momentary security and mind peace and that of the reader by positing cultural apotheosis as the other of narrativity. Irony predominates in such moments of narrative apartheid as the ultimate mode of self resistance. Community lost its healing powers as the individual melts into subjectivity and alienation. The narrator recoils into self, as a result, and shuts his ego from the pain of communal existence: “ I am taking no calls” (325). This simply ushers the narrator’s complete separation from the symbolic order of language and the atrophy of communal identity.

The text suddenly breaks as a new narrative vignette intrudes. The authorial will to silence dissolves into the formal space of the supermarket: “The supermarket shelves have been rearranged.” (325). Everyone is lost and a confusion follows as people miss their daily routine at the level of cultural habituation which is consumerism. The narrator is elated and experiences a spiritual revelation. This transcendence seems to establish the narrator’s faith in consumerism as symbolized by the supermarket. Once again the narrative distances itself temporally in such a way as to create sequential ambivalence: “It happened one day without warning” (325). Such effect of temporal distancing is, undoubtedly, meant to create a semblance of narrative independence. This episode is self-contained as it maintains its own paradigm of signification. Its figuration of meaning and thematization of world-views operate independently as a mini text that is situated within a web of intertexuality.

Apart from the single incident of Jack’s refusal to take calls from his doctor whom operates as a sequential consequence of the murder narrative, the final chapter fails to behave as an ending to Gladney’s narrative. It fails to bring that narrative to a point of actational saturation necessary for its resolution. Closure as such never happens at the end of White Noise at least from the perspective of the textual paradigm of classic narrative poetics. The final chapter of the novel is more or less a narrative coda that is designed to cap the main narrative line of the Gladneys. The critic David Cowart makes an accidental reference to this possibility in his pioneering study Don Delillo: The Physics of Language when he states at the end of his discussion of White Noise that: “Like a great symphony, Don DeLillo’s novel ends with a triple coda.”( 3)

While the critical reception of White Noise agrees that the novel lacks a formal ending some of its astute advocators are too conservative to admit this lack. Marion Muirhead, for instance, theorizes that “the final chapter of White Noise contains two endings, the traditional American sunset, followed by the real of final ending, a scene from the supermarket, which may actually be a new beginning.” (4) Such a reading is necessarily minimalist as it seeks to simplify things at the risk of affective fallacy. However, Muirhead’s categorization of White Noise as a novel with double ending is sound enough in terms of internal textual logic in spite of its misplaced assumptions. The sunset scene in the last chapter can be considered a formal ending to Jack’s narrative in chapter 39. This scene maintains strong connections with Jack’s concluding sentence in chapter thirty-nine: “There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze.” (321) The sunset sightseeing narrative incident in chapter forty reproduces the apocalyptic tone of this concluding sentence. The narrative voice frames the sightseeing as ‘waiting’ in ‘awe’ in front of the ‘atmospheric weirdness’ of the sunsets because of the toxic airborne event. Yet the highly charged language used to describe the ‘secular response’ of Jack and other watchers, rather than the scene of the sunset itself, tends to furnish the narrative with strong apocalyptic overtones of doom and annihilation. The whole sunset sightseeing narrative becomes a communal ritual rather than a sequential episodic narrative. The murder narrative happens once but the sunsets are always being watched by the Gladney’s and the community in such a way that nullifies any sense of a specific temporal perspective.

In the closing chapter of the novel, the narrative momentum generated by Jack’s unsuccessful plot against his panic gives way to a series of interchangeable sequences. Thus, by reading this plot as one against Jack’s own panic of death, Reeve and Kerridge manage to present the narrative episodes of the last chapter as textual spaces of belated psychic reactions. Panic inscribes itself in the narrative threads of the final chapter as the ultimate force in the world of White Noise. This turns these narrative threads into textual manifestations of the phenomenology of death in the novel: ‘The anxiety for control which had driven Jack on, towards knowledge and murder, or towards hosting his Hitler conference, is set in these last episodes against various forms of reaction.’ (7) Such a reading, however, extends the sense of action and reaction that leads to these narrative descriptions to thematize contesting forms of panic. In each of the narrative threads in the final chapter panic is extended from the ‘personal’ into the ‘communal’ and then contested towards resolution.

Wilder’s tricycle adventure across the highway, the sunsets watching and the rearranged shelves of the supermarket evoke different forms of ‘communal’ panic which are ultimately contested to disrupt the very cultural grounds of this panic as a form of mass hysteria. This hysteria is fashioned and encountered through narracistic recoil into selfhood. Jack’s failure to resolve or, at least, face his chronic panic of death resolves itself in the therapeutic power of communal healing. The subsequent resolution of this mass hysteria into catharsis helps bring closure through the grading of this cathartic resolution of panic throughout the three threads. In each of these vignettes Jack experiences a revelation that brings his world-view to a crucial reorientation. This starts with his fascination with Wilder’s defiance of death on the highway. It progress further in his resignation to his doom after the toxic event, directly after the sunset scene when he refuses to take calls from the doctor responsible for his fatal radiation case. He actually comes to accept his world with all its apocalyptic atrophies. Death, after this enlightenment, becomes a curious mixture of beauty and terror. In the sunset watching scene it adds beauty to the apocalyptic terror of the toxic residual in the sunset. Fascination and the ultimate revelation culminate in the supermarket scene which crystallizes in self-recovery. Jack renews his faith in the existential codes of his world. The new identity that commodity culture confers on him is the ultimate point in the novel’s politics of closure as it involves both completion and catharsis.

The critic Stephanie S. Halldorson uncovers the same politics of closure in the final chapter of White Noise but with important differences. First, she characterizes the ending of the novel as ‘triptych’ which means that a politics of plurality is highlighted to achieve closure.(8) DeLillo abandons the classic narrative closure of resolution and ending in favour of a more postmodernist politics of closure which manipulates a multiplicity of textual spaces that ‘taunts the reader and the consumer’ by virtue of its indecidibilty. (9) This sense of indecidibilty results from the fact that the ‘images’ that DeLillo uses to construct this ending ‘hint but do not assert; they seem unfinished without a narrative, and remain, essentially, unnarrated, unexplained.’ Indeed, DeLillo uses narrative to build up metaphors whose connection to the main narrative of White Noise remains ambivalent. DeLillo’s ‘images’ fail to materialize into ‘narratives’ in the concluding chapter is symptomatic of the failure of ‘representation’ to materialize as textuality throughout the entire novel. It is in this respect that the ‘triptychs ending’ can be said to share a common ground with the main narrative bulk of the novel.

Although Jack’s journey is not that heroic, Halldorson insight remains intact. Jack is more an antihero caught in the logos of his decentred narrative. The anxieties of the authorial voice to adapt to the ‘pain of self-consciousness’ in the final chapter are undoubtedly parody in nature. (12) Each of the narrative episodes in the final chapter is designed as an epiphany where the authorial presence is geared towards utter self-consciousness. Such an epiphanic structure is essentially parodic in nature as it echoes the string of epiphanies that makes up Jack’s encounter with Mink in chapter thirty-nine. This is particularly relevant to Wilder’s death-defying tricycle trip across the highway which ends in ‘a baptism into a new realm of awareness similar to Jack’s awakening after his own wound in the previous chapter.’ (13) What is being parodic here is definitely Jack’s epiphany early in his encounter with Mink. Both epiphanies have similar linguistic structures and narrative bent:

I have continued to advance in consciousness. Things glowed, a secret life rising out of them…. I knew for the first time what rain really was. I knew what wet was…. I knew who I was in the network of meanings…. I saw beyond words…. I tried to see myself from Mink’s view point. (310)

Not only perceiving the nature of pain and death as the essential ingredients of humanity was Jack able to achieve through this encounter but also the very human instinct to socialize and be part of a community. The last sentence above suggests strongly that Jack has learnt to transcend the closure form of individuality into the openness of the community and the communal self.

The novel White Noise was popular one among DeLillo novels. Don DeLillo won the National Award for Fiction for this particular novel in the year 1986. Paul Bryant calls White Noise as anti-realistic fiction. Though the novel published few years after the Bhopal gas tragedy in India, many critics compared the air borne toxic event in the novel White Noise with the original Bhopal Gas tragedy. The novel White Noise was published in the year 1985. White Noise is Don DeLillo’s seventh Novel. White Noise is more than a life novel.

The main character of the novel is Jack Gladney. The plot of the novel moves around the character Jack Gladney and his family. The narrator of the novel Jack Gladney, a middle-aged family man and college professor who lives in “Blacksmith” with his wife Babette and four children. Through Gladney’s narrative, DeLillo presents the inherent and insidious dangers lying beneath American consumerism. He also demonstrates the utmost hopeless search for a stable identity. DeLillo highlights Gladney’s struggle against materialistic society through various incidents that alarm the dangers of the unstable life living by Gladney and his family. The central focus of the novel is the deceptive existence and vicious effects of technology upon the individual and the milieu. Lentricchia says “just how far down and in media culture has penetrated” (102). By presenting the world through the perspective of Jack Gladney, DeLillo effectively demonstrates that there is a point of resistance against technological understanding of the world.

The central concern of White Noise (1985) is the fear of death, and the nature of dread. Fear of death makes college professor Jack Gladney to wake up in a cold sweat, feeling ‘small, weak, death bound, alone’ (224). The same fear of death leads Babette to be dependent on unauthorised drug Dylar, a medicine to overcome the fear of death. The anxiety of death leads to the novel’s fundamental questions: What is real, and what is the self?

DeLillo is more interested in the strategies, the stories, human response and models used to overcome the fear of death. In White Noise, line of attack to escape from death leads the characters nearer to it. Escaping from the airborne toxic event only exposes Jack further toward death. The unauthorised drug Dylar used by Babette, instead of alleviating fear of death, creates problem of living without self. The plan to overcome death demands escaping of life and self, leaving proximity and reality.

Death itself adapts, expands, evades in the novel White Noise. Death is stronger in the world and so even the stronger drug like Dylar does not work, leads to living death. Murray, friend and colleague of Jack Gladney says, ‘Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain….Is it a law of nature?’ (WN150)

Technology is a part of life in American environment. The American environment in White Noise is a mixture of representation and artifice. The media explosion of information which informs the individuals only doubts that only make the big picture of uncertainty about life. In White Noise new technology development does not bring increased knowledge, rather it brings profound uncertainty and ambivalence, creating a desire for immortality on one hand while threatening with the fear to live on the other. For example, the drug Dylar is designed to ease the fear of death; instead it brings death inside the lives. The airborne toxic event itself is a by-product of the advanced technology that goes into the making of insecticides. When it accidently released into the air, the people of Blacksmith are asked to evacuate their hometown and leads to dreadful fear of living. Babette says, ‘Every advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more scared’ (WN 161).

Amongst the vast growth of technology, Gladney struggles to shape his consciousness and the world around him. Gladney and his family struggle against the postmodern elements of the environment to survive in the technological world. In “Don DeLillo’s Postmodern Pastoral,” critic Dana Philips identifies Gladney’s struggle against the postmodern elements of his environment and adds, “Jack Gladney struggles and largely fails to decipher”(241).

DeLillo highlights Gladney’s struggle against the technology through a series of events that symbolises the dangers of living. Gladney is only half conscious of the “hidden terror” lying behind the technological surroundings. The struggle Gladney faces moulds him to become aware of the environment he lives. Through Gladney’s perspective, DeLillo demonstrates that the individuals in the novel are aware of the dangers of technology as well as capable of resisting it by survival and way of living. Lentricchia accurately describes the disaster event of the novel through technology as “the environment unintentionally produced by advanced technology, the effects of technology, the by-products, the fallout” (99). Though there are effects and fallout of technology, Jack’s consciousness throughout the first section of the novel depends on technology and it is absurd.

Marriage plays an important role in the life of Gladney’s. Jack and Babette’s prior marriages have failed, and the past unsuccessful relationships serve as indicators of the rootlessness of non-existence life. At the same time, the past unsuccessful marriages resulted in the creation of life. The children in the novel White Noise exist as reminders of the ties that Jack and Babette had in the past and they bind them in the current lives. Jack, Babette and the respective children constitute a family, which creates a new beginning in the technology-oriented life. In fact, the children in Gladney’s family represent the human ability to survive in spite of the environment they live.

DeLillo foregrounds Gladney’s troubled perceptions of life in Blacksmith by contrasting them with the flippant attitudes of the daily activities in the family. For instance, Gladney is disturbed by his family’s Friday night ritual of watching television, especially when the family finds so much pleasure in watching natural disasters on TV. It alarms Jack and the family about the hints of troubled self.

Sleeping leads an individual to a peaceful state. But for Jack’s family sleep itself was influenced by technological development. In the first chapter Jack explains,

Babette and I and our children by previous marriages live at the end of a quiet street in what was once a wooded area with deep ravines. There is an expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream (4).

It is not the sounds of the woods that calm Jack to sleep; it is the noise of traffic and the sounds remind Jack of death. Even at sleep, Jack fears about death. The natural element sleep has been transfigured into a man-made element.

Many characters in White Noise there do not aware of the contrast between industry and nature because the distinction between natural and man-made has been eliminated by the dominance of the technology image. This is more evident when Jack goes with Murray to see a local tourist attraction called “The Most Photographed Bam in America.” Frank Lentricchia in Libra as Postmodern Critique refers the photographed barn as “primal for his imagination of America” (193).

Introduction to Narrative Closure in White Noise

Analysing the narrative structure of the works provide and interconnection between the formal and thematic function of the novel. Fiction provides a distinctively narrative means of countering the loss of individual, meaningful experience so often associated with the ahistorical, simulacral, and absurdly ironic nature of postmodernity. DeLillo is considered as one of the important writers of the twentieth century. Many critics has seen his work as exemplifying novels which examine the present sociocultural condition offered by Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson and Jean- Francois Lyotard, so casting it as Postmodern prototype.

The Ambiguity of Closure in White Noise

Although Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise boosts no formal ending in terms of plot resolution, it manages to achieve a high sense of narrative closure. The novel ends with a short chapter that runs counter to the narrative demands of plot logic and reader’s expectations. After a long and surrealistic chapter in which the main character Professor Jack Gladney attempt to murder the scientist Willie Mink for seducing his wife Babette and, subsequently, experiences a nightmarish series of adventures in Germantown, the novel ends with a short, epiphany-like chapter which comprises three narrative vignettes that are in complete discontinuity with the narrative sequence of Jack’s plot.

Discontinuity and Narrative Vignettes

The murder chapter leaves Jack exhausted and concludes on his authorial-like tongue that: “There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze.” (2) The final chapter that follows immediately does not fulfil this prophetic promise for it starts vigorously with a new narrative that concerns the highway bike adventure of Babette’s five-year old son Wilder. This narrative does not only distance itself temporally from that of the murder scene but also creates a deliberate sequential ambivalence: “This was the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle …” (322). While this rhetorical initio mimics the openings of the classic folkloric adventure tales it breaks down the line of linear narrative progression Jack’s narrative tries to create throughout the text. The reader can never be sure whether this happened after or before the murder narrative.

Temporal Ambivalence and Sequential Disruption

The same textual tactics are employed with the second narrative episodes in the final chapter. The intensity of Wilder’s adventure which arouses in the reader a high sense of fear and expectations after the manner of classical tragedy suddenly give way to the tranquillity of the sunset scene: “We go to the overpass all the time. Babette, Wilder and I.” (324). The absence of transition and cohesion markers between these two narratives shakes further the reader’s sense of plot progression. Self and community intrude to disrupt this sense of tranquillity that nature provides momentarily: “Men in Mylex suits are still in the area” (325) undermines the both the narrator’s sense of momentary security and mind peace and that of the reader by positing cultural apotheosis as the other of narrativity. Irony predominates in such moments of narrative apartheid as the ultimate mode of self resistance. Community lost its healing powers as the individual melts into subjectivity and alienation. The narrator recoils into self, as a result, and shuts his ego from the pain of communal existence: “ I am taking no calls” (325). This simply ushers the narrator’s complete separation from the symbolic order of language and the atrophy of communal identity.

The text suddenly breaks as a new narrative vignette intrudes. The authorial will to silence dissolves into the formal space of the supermarket: “The supermarket shelves have been rearranged.” (325). Everyone is lost and a confusion follows as people miss their daily routine at the level of cultural habituation which is consumerism. The narrator is elated and experiences a spiritual revelation. This transcendence seems to establish the narrator’s faith in consumerism as symbolized by the supermarket. Once again the narrative distances itself temporally in such a way as to create sequential ambivalence: “It happened one day without warning” (325). Such effect of temporal distancing is, undoubtedly, meant to create a semblance of narrative independence. This episode is self-contained as it maintains its own paradigm of signification. Its figuration of meaning and thematization of world-views operate independently as a mini text that is situated within a web of intertexuality.

The Final Chapter as a Narrative Coda

Apart from the single incident of Jack’s refusal to take calls from his doctor whom operates as a sequential consequence of the murder narrative, the final chapter fails to behave as an ending to Gladney’s narrative. It fails to bring that narrative to a point of actational saturation necessary for its resolution. Closure as such never happens at the end of White Noise at least from the perspective of the textual paradigm of classic narrative poetics. The final chapter of the novel is more or less a narrative coda that is designed to cap the main narrative line of the Gladneys. The critic David Cowart makes an accidental reference to this possibility in his pioneering study Don Delillo: The Physics of Language when he states at the end of his discussion of White Noise that: “Like a great symphony, Don DeLillo’s novel ends with a triple coda.”( 3)

While the critical reception of White Noise agrees that the novel lacks a formal ending some of its astute advocators are too conservative to admit this lack. Marion Muirhead, for instance, theorizes that “the final chapter of White Noise contains two endings, the traditional American sunset, followed by the real of final ending, a scene from the supermarket, which may actually be a new beginning.” (4) Such a reading is necessarily minimalist as it seeks to simplify things at the risk of affective fallacy. However, Muirhead’s categorization of White Noise as a novel with double ending is sound enough in terms of internal textual logic in spite of its misplaced assumptions. The sunset scene in the last chapter can be considered a formal ending to Jack’s narrative in chapter 39. This scene maintains strong connections with Jack’s concluding sentence in chapter thirty-nine: “There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze.” (321) The sunset sightseeing narrative incident in chapter forty reproduces the apocalyptic tone of this concluding sentence. The narrative voice frames the sightseeing as ‘waiting’ in ‘awe’ in front of the ‘atmospheric weirdness’ of the sunsets because of the toxic airborne event. Yet the highly charged language used to describe the ‘secular response’ of Jack and other watchers, rather than the scene of the sunset itself, tends to furnish the narrative with strong apocalyptic overtones of doom and annihilation. The whole sunset sightseeing narrative becomes a communal ritual rather than a sequential episodic narrative. The murder narrative happens once but the sunsets are always being watched by the Gladney’s and the community in such a way that nullifies any sense of a specific temporal perspective.

In the closing chapter of the novel, the narrative momentum generated by Jack’s unsuccessful plot against his panic gives way to a series of interchangeable sequences. Thus, by reading this plot as one against Jack’s own panic of death, Reeve and Kerridge manage to present the narrative episodes of the last chapter as textual spaces of belated psychic reactions. Panic inscribes itself in the narrative threads of the final chapter as the ultimate force in the world of White Noise. This turns these narrative threads into textual manifestations of the phenomenology of death in the novel: ‘The anxiety for control which had driven Jack on, towards knowledge and murder, or towards hosting his Hitler conference, is set in these last episodes against various forms of reaction.’ (7) Such a reading, however, extends the sense of action and reaction that leads to these narrative descriptions to thematize contesting forms of panic. In each of the narrative threads in the final chapter panic is extended from the ‘personal’ into the ‘communal’ and then contested towards resolution.

Wilder’s tricycle adventure across the highway, the sunsets watching and the rearranged shelves of the supermarket evoke different forms of ‘communal’ panic which are ultimately contested to disrupt the very cultural grounds of this panic as a form of mass hysteria. This hysteria is fashioned and encountered through narracistic recoil into selfhood. Jack’s failure to resolve or, at least, face his chronic panic of death resolves itself in the therapeutic power of communal healing. The subsequent resolution of this mass hysteria into catharsis helps bring closure through the grading of this cathartic resolution of panic throughout the three threads. In each of these vignettes Jack experiences a revelation that brings his world-view to a crucial reorientation. This starts with his fascination with Wilder’s defiance of death on the highway. It progress further in his resignation to his doom after the toxic event, directly after the sunset scene when he refuses to take calls from the doctor responsible for his fatal radiation case. He actually comes to accept his world with all its apocalyptic atrophies. Death, after this enlightenment, becomes a curious mixture of beauty and terror. In the sunset watching scene it adds beauty to the apocalyptic terror of the toxic residual in the sunset. Fascination and the ultimate revelation culminate in the supermarket scene which crystallizes in self-recovery. Jack renews his faith in the existential codes of his world. The new identity that commodity culture confers on him is the ultimate point in the novel’s politics of closure as it involves both completion and catharsis.

Epiphanic Structure and Parodic Nature of Closure

The critic Stephanie S. Halldorson uncovers the same politics of closure in the final chapter of White Noise but with important differences. First, she characterizes the ending of the novel as ‘triptych’ which means that a politics of plurality is highlighted to achieve closure.(8) DeLillo abandons the classic narrative closure of resolution and ending in favour of a more postmodernist politics of closure which manipulates a multiplicity of textual spaces that ‘taunts the reader and the consumer’ by virtue of its indecidibilty. (9) This sense of indecidibilty results from the fact that the ‘images’ that DeLillo uses to construct this ending ‘hint but do not assert; they seem unfinished without a narrative, and remain, essentially, unnarrated, unexplained.’ Indeed, DeLillo uses narrative to build up metaphors whose connection to the main narrative of White Noise remains ambivalent. DeLillo’s ‘images’ fail to materialize into ‘narratives’ in the concluding chapter is symptomatic of the failure of ‘representation’ to materialize as textuality throughout the entire novel. It is in this respect that the ‘triptychs ending’ can be said to share a common ground with the main narrative bulk of the novel.

Although Jack’s journey is not that heroic, Halldorson insight remains intact. Jack is more an antihero caught in the logos of his decentred narrative. The anxieties of the authorial voice to adapt to the ‘pain of self-consciousness’ in the final chapter are undoubtedly parody in nature. (12) Each of the narrative episodes in the final chapter is designed as an epiphany where the authorial presence is geared towards utter self-consciousness. Such an epiphanic structure is essentially parodic in nature as it echoes the string of epiphanies that makes up Jack’s encounter with Mink in chapter thirty-nine. This is particularly relevant to Wilder’s death-defying tricycle trip across the highway which ends in ‘a baptism into a new realm of awareness similar to Jack’s awakening after his own wound in the previous chapter.’ (13) What is being parodic here is definitely Jack’s epiphany early in his encounter with Mink. Both epiphanies have similar linguistic structures and narrative bent:

I have continued to advance in consciousness. Things glowed, a secret life rising out of them…. I knew for the first time what rain really was. I knew what wet was…. I knew who I was in the network of meanings…. I saw beyond words…. I tried to see myself from Mink’s view point. (310)

Not only perceiving the nature of pain and death as the essential ingredients of humanity was Jack able to achieve through this encounter but also the very human instinct to socialize and be part of a community. The last sentence above suggests strongly that Jack has learnt to transcend the closure form of individuality into the openness of the community and the communal self.

The sunset watching scene and the supermarket scene further enhance the parodic nature of Jack’s epiphanies in the final chapter. They show Jack caught in the duality of the self as individualized and communal. While Jack is fully rejoicing in the communal rituals of sunset watching and consumer ethos, he is not yet completely liberated of the narcissism of narrow individualism. Jack’s sharing the community perspective of the intensified sunsets betrays a note of doubt and apocalypse.

Throughout White Noise, Jack’s ability to buy highly advertised marketed images is directly related to his psychological need to belong. Such a marketing system is based upon the illusion that belonging to this cultural advertising scheme is a guaranteed method for staving off death. Murray reminds of this when he states that “here we don’t die, we shop” (p.38). Jack acts accordingly when he feels disconnected and alone as he confronts the cultural dumping ground known as the mall:

I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it…I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgot existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men’s wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors is security rooms. I traded money for goods. I was bigger than these sums. (84)

The final supermarket scene introduces two important existential metaphors as objective correlatives for this transcendence of death via commodification of selfhood. DeLillo invokes the powers of technology and the tabloids as the agency of Jack’s rebirth. Technology restores the shoppers to their existential serenity:

But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age , our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. (326)

Jack’s acceptance of the divinity of technology in his world reflects yet another crucial change in his perception of himself and his reality. In the paragraph immediately preceding the supermarket episode in the final chapter Jack stops taking telephone calls from his doctor. He explains his decision to be resulting from his phobia of technology: ‘He wants to insert me once in the imaging block, where

The novels taken for analysis are White Noise and Libra. The main protagonist in the novel White Noise is Jack Gladney. The work focuses on the ideas fear of death, creating false identity to survive in the society.

The choice of the supermarket is significant for Jack’s ultimate transcendence. It is the trope of existence throughout the novel. Indeed, the supermarket scene in the closing chapter is mystically charged as a sacred space for personal transcendence. The supermarket is the place where the ‘White Noise’ of the novel’s title makes its most significant appearance. “And over it all,” Jack narrates as he stands in the shopping aisle listening to the supermarket’s ambient noise, “or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.” (36) This is an almost mystical observation by a highly attuned consciousness, reminiscent of a mystic on the brink of spiritual discovery. Murray, Jacks young colleague and the novel’s spokesman of postmodernist ideas, makes the comparison explicit. “This place recharges us spiritually,” (37) he says about the function of the supermarket.

Indeed, the supermarket is the novel’s cathedral where Jack finds himself surrounded by incantations as in the enchanting repetition of the commercial phrase ‘Kleenex Softique’ (39), customs as in Jack’s observation of the ceremonial behaviour of the customers in the supermarket: “People wrote checks, tall boys bagged the merchandise … the slowly moving line edged toward the last purchase point”(40), and its own form of asceticism which Jack senses in the “new austerity” of generic foods. It is not church, exactly, but as Murray says, “the difference is less marked than you think.” (38)The same is true to a lesser extent for the Mid-Village Mall, where Jack shops with reckless abandon and feels “an endless well-being.” (84) When he leaves the supermarket with two shopping carts he feels that he had achieved “a fullness of being.” (84)

The supermarket is actually the agency where individuals such as Jack can be liberated from the dread of death through the power of consumption. Earlier in the novel Murray spells the mystical power of death transcendence of the supermarket in his reflections on The Tibetan Book of the Dead:

Tibetans believe there is a transitional state between death and rebirth. Death is a waiting period, basically. Soon a fresh womb will receive the soul. In the meantime the soul restores to itself some of the divinity lost at birth…. That’s what I think of whenever I come in here [supermarket]. This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It’s full of psychic data. (37)

Jack is overwhelmed by the marketing images that barrage him at the mall. He shops out of his desire or need to cultivate a sense of belonging. The products he buys have no practical function beyond their ability to make him feel somehow included in the vast cultural system around him. Part of DeLillo’s strategy to achieve this sense is through the representation of the mall as a literal palace designed intentionally and specifically to seduce the consumer. The consumer culture offers the illusion that life exists not in individuality, but rather in constructing an identity based on one’s ability to engage the consumer culture. Such an engagement involves spending money and buying empty products with powerful images.

Consequently, Jack’s involvement in the communal panic caused by the rearrangement of the grocery items on the shelves of the supermarket in the closing chapter of White Noise is really a participation in the rituals and spells collected in The Tibetan Book of the Dead – ‘a guide to dying and being reborn.’ (73) Furthermore, packages and products displayed in the supermarket are the ‘psychic data’ which fulfil Jack’s spiritual yearning. Commodities fill the psychological emptiness created by the overwhelming death obsession. He is no longer afraid of death because packages and containers can satisfy his spiritual craving to be reborn.

Thus, instead of dealing with the issues of mortality as universal connection among all people, DeLillo provides a thorough investigation of the late twentieth-century cultural and psychological mechanisms that attempt to fashion and obscure the relationship between the self and death.

If the supermarket is the ‘pathway’ for Jack’s transcendence of death obsession, technology, as symbolized by the ‘holographic scanners,’ is the agency of this pathway. It is the agency for the rebirth of the dead: ‘the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.’ The critic Peter Boxall suggests that ‘ the introduction of the bar code turns consumers themselves into products, shuffling automata whose choices and ‘lifestyles’ are determined by the demands of the supermarket, rather than vice versa.’ This is not dehumanization as much as embracing technology as a way of salvation from twisted existence and death obsession. The absence of religion or tradition in the world of White Noise is being compensated by the values of technology and consumerism. This clearly reflected in the strong note of fascination and mysticism in Jack’s description of the magical powers of the ‘holographic scanners.’ DeLillo confers divinity on them as they are capable of decoding the binary secret of life itself. The conversation between Murray and Babette on Supermarket explains the role played by it in attaining self for Gladney.

This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It’s full of psychic data…. Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. Not that we would want to, not that any useful purpose would be served. This is not Tibet. Even Tibet is not Tibet anymore. (38)

For Siskind, the supermarket offers ceremony, mystery, and magic that appeal to his spiritual sensibilities. However, Murray also explains the postmodernist condition here; nothing is real anymore, and we do not want to decipher or peel off the layers. Nevertheless, it is at the supermarket that the waves and radiation speak to him and fulfil him. Critics such as Lentricchia and LeClair see the supermarket as the new place of magic or spirituality in the postmodern environment.

White Noise begins and ends with a ritual. The first is the cavalcade of station wagons arriving for the new school year, which Jack describes as a spectacle which he has not missed in 21 years. It ends with the communal ritual of selfhood transcendence. Jack can only get rid of his dread of death by embracing a collective consumer identity of the post-capitalist society.

Next concept that helps Jack and Babette on survival is the sunset. For Peyser, the sunsets “serve as a screen onto which characters project their own anxieties about the future just over the horizon” (6). The sunsets are ambiguous and they do cause a degree of anxiety. However, it is through his interpretations of the sunsets that Jack Gladney demonstrates his ability to accept the wonder and awe of the postmodern while still maintaining a critical and wary eye to the dangers around him that may have caused them. The sunsets in White Noise grow in significance as the narrative proceeds and they grow in magnificence as additional contaminants are added to the air. The sunset is here a sign of family community, but also a sign of distrust and fear within the family, as Heinrich seems to fear the ‘modern sunset.’ The Gladneys watch the sunset with “wonder and dread.” The sunsets, despite the nervousness they invoke, do also seem to create a communicative atmosphere similar to the one Lentricchia says is created by the shopping malls and especially by the supermarket.

In his 1985 novel White Noise, Don DeLillo paints a modern society that is composed of systems too great to comprehend, putting control out of the hands of individuals. Don DeLillo crafts a postmodern society governed by cryptic systems, a world in which individuals are alienated from reality by technological codes and formulas dictate success. Dellilo challenges the postmodern thought that academics, technology and institutions can answer the questions of life and death and offers death as a shared burden and final resolution.

In Jack’s life the fear of death is a force that operates in a system outside of his control. This unknown system became an all-consuming force beginning at age twenty; this desperation for answers has lead to Jack’s invention of a Hitler studies academic program. DeLillo explores how Jack integrates into a larger system to via formality. Jack’s professional status as a Hitler Studies department head gives Jack the formal distance of academia he needs from this fear: “Death was strictly a professional matter here”. At the same time, Jack is very close to the ideas of death. He deals with his fear of death by studying and attempting to embody Hitler, the “master of death.” Hitler, who reduced humane life into numbers and mechanized death on an unprecedented scale, gives Jack a formulaic method to comprehend the unknown: “So Hitler gave me something to grow into and develop toward”. DeLillo shows that Jack hides behind Hitler as a shield not only from the unknown but as a way to anchor his existence. Jack’s ex Tweedy uses Hitler to address Jack during a superficial conversation: “How is Hitler? Fine solid dependable”. DeLillo suggests that Jack can link himself to immortality by connecting himself to the immortal, unchanging Hitler. Despite Jack’s deliberate creation of his Hitler studies program, however, he does not even understand his own success; he relies on his costume as a formulaic way to achieve success, saying he has “built a career” on it and “can’t teach Hitler without” his dark glasses. Where Jack once had achieved equilibrium with uncertainty of death through Hitler, he now faces the subject of death on an intimate and personal level.

After exposure to the toxic event caused by an industrial byproduct, Jack comes face to face with his own mechanized death. Upon facing the reality of his death Jack feels he needs to dawn his Hitler studies costume to shelter himself: “It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying. I wanted my academic gown and dark glasses”. When his life data is brought up from Simuvac’s diagnostic computer it illustrates Jack’s new estrangement from his sense of comfort once found in his elaborate Hitler Studies persona: “He spent a fair amount of time tapping on the keys and then studying the coded responses on the data screen… and I tapped into your history. I’m getting bracketed numbers with pulsing stars. What does that mean? You’d rather not know”. Here the use of diction is important to note. The Simuvac officer describes the data output s as “stars and bracketed numbers,” a code DeLillo uses to challenge technology’s capacity to predict and understand death. This recurring motif continually denies clear information to Jack and medical professionals. Jack describes the new code as “a network of symbols [that] has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods.” In this instance DeLillo shows Jack’s vulnerability to the new intimate uncertainty of death abstracted by technological codes that propels Jack to seek answers in the traditional medical sciences paradigm.

To decode the new unknown Babbette suggests, “Why don’t you have a checkup? Wouldn’t you feel better if you found out nothing was there?” (220). As a result of many checkups Jack is alerted of a potential potassium imbalance. The doctor again accesses Jack’s data on a computer but denies Jack the details, offering only again a cryptic message. The doctor tells Jack: “Look here. A bracketed number with computerized stars. What does that mean? There’s no point your knowing at this stage”. DeLillo suggests that medical professionals don’t know any more than Jack. The young doctor, described as being less than confident, follows a fixed assessment where Jack chooses the most popular answers and is offered a sealed envelope of medical codes for the doctor to interpret. Leaving the visit with the potassium imbalance problem unresolved, and with a new troubling technological code in hand, Jack concludes that his life cannot be reordered by medical science. DeLillo shows through Jack that technology has ultimately failed to reconcile systems outside of human control or to answer the questions of life and death.

However, DeLillo offers a solution by using the supermarket as an analogy for life. When the system becomes chaotic, with rearranged shelves, smeared printing, and people attempting to “discern the underlying logic”, DeLillo suggests a reconciliation by realizing the shared burden: “This is where we wait together, regardless of age. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks”. DeLillo suggest that death is a powerful unifying feature, common and inevitable, and that death resolves itself by allowing the individual to leave our shared reality and interpret the codes: “The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secrete of every item, infallibly”. DeLillo concludes by portraying a resolution in death: the codes of life and death wrested from the gods will be made known.

Don Dellilo’s protagonist in his novel “White Noise,” Jack Gladney, has a “nuclear family” that is, ostensibly, a prime example of the disjointed nature way of the “family” of the 80’s and 90’s — what with Jack’s multiple past marriages and the fact that his children aren’t all related. It’s basically the antipodal image of the 1950’s “nuclear family.” Despite this surface-level disjointedness, it his family and the “extrasensory rapport” that he shares with them that allows Jack to survive in his world. Murray, Jack’s friend, argues that “The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted”. Heinrich, Jack’s son, explicates this notion in his constant “doubting” of reality, arguing, for example, that it’s “all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex”. Jack is caught in a perpetual tension between experiencing reality and relationships with his family as “actual” while simultaneously being told that there is no “actual,” that man is nothing more than “the sum total of” his “data”. It is only through a recounting of the past, the sensual experience of objects and the transcendent nature of his relationship with is children that Jack is able to affirm the actuality of the “actual,” to affirm, for example, that love is more than merely a biological chemical.

Ironically, for Jack and Babette, it is only by recounting the past that they are able to “rescue” themselves “from the past”. Jack explains that Babette and he talk of everything, “The smell of panties, the sense of empty afternoons, the feel of things as they rained across our skin, things as facts and passions, the feel of pain, loss…delight. In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now…The means by which we rescue ourselves from the past”. So in recounting “the smell of panties” etc., and viewing such encounters with either “irony, sympathy and fond amusement,” Jack is able not only to affirm the present and escape the past, but accomplishes something much larger: namely the ability to affirm the “realness” of such feelings. Thus the family, in this instance Babette, serves as the medium through which Jack is able to overcome Heinrich’s skepticism (which is representative of modern “science” as to the “reality” of human emotions. DeLillo’s image, moreover, of Jack and Babette “rescuing” themselves “from the past” also suggests that without family or someone to commune with, man can become lost in the past.

DeLillo’s novel is almost obsessively concerned with appliances: TVs, radios, microwaves etc. They are omnipresent, not only in the characters worlds but within the narrative itself. DeLillo repeatedly interrupts his narrative with sentences like “The TV said: And other trends that could dramatically impact our portfolio” or “MasterCard, Visa, American Express” or “That chirping sound was just the radiator”. Just as Jack’s world is one suffused with such objects, so too is the narrative, a technique which DeLillo uses to force the reader into Jack Gladney’s world. Objects play a dualistic role in Jack’s familial life. Jack tells us that “Babette and I do our talking in the kitchen…We regard the rest of the house as storage space for… all the unused objects of earlier marriages and different sets of children…Things, boxes…There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding”. In this instance the disjointed structure of Jack’s family is encapsulated in objects. Although such objects don’t allow him to affirm the actuality of the “actual” they do show him where he can and cannot make such an affirmation. That is, they create spaces (“the kitchen and the bedroom”) where Jack and Babette can talk, spaces where the actuality of the “actual” can be affirmed. But objects play another role as well, serving, as Jack puts it in describing one trip to the supermarket, to create a “sense of replenishment,” “of well-being,” of “security and contentment,” of “a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less”. His family, we are told, “gloried” in such outings. Heinrich, of course, would argue that such feelings have no meaning or “realness,” that they are nothing more than than the presence of certain chemicals being released. That although objects, real touchable knowable “things,” may serve to strengthen familial feelings, the reason for such feelings has no basis in reality; that is, they don’t exist except as biological chemicals.

DeLillo tells us later, however, that “It was a period of looks and glances, teeming interactions, part of the sensory array I ordinarily cherish. Heat, noise, lights, looks, words, gestures, personalities, appliances. A colloquial density that makes family life the one medium of sense knowledge in which an astonishment of heart is routinely contained”. Thus in this instance DeLillo suggests that “appliances” within familial life do function to affirm the actuality of the “actual” as revealed by his phrase “the astonishment of heart.” This phrase suggests that “sense knowledge” is more than, as Heinrich would argue, a biological chemical, but rather has a basis in the “heart.” Of course DeLillo’s refers not to the biological “heart” but to the heart as a metaphor for the organ which creates “feelings,” feelings which are based not on biological chemicals but which have a poetic reality all on their own. This sentiment is echoed repeatedly as Jack has repeated moments of “splendid transcendence,” moments he tells us, “I depend on my children for”. He avers, “It was these secondary levels of life, these extrasensory flashes and floating nuances of being, these pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly, that made me believe we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things”. It is in these moments, as he watches Wilder sleep, or holds him as he cries, or watches Heinrich “walk through the downpour” loving him “with an animal desperation”, that Jack gains the strength he needs to survive. Despite Heinrich’s rants, which he realizes do carry a measure of truth, and Murray’s claims as to the strength of families having a direct correlation with the inability to perceive reality, Jack’s family nonetheless, and the “extransensory” moments he shares with them, prove to him that feelings like these don’t exist solely on a biological level, that their reality lies not in their chemical composition but in another separate reality, a reality which allows Jack to affirm the actuality of the “actual.”

Consumer culture has been discussed by many authors and philosophers as long as the human race has been consuming. Consumerism is often referred to as a negative force in society, specifically in the United States, due to America’s image of surplus and leisure even in times of societal and economic suffering as discussed in Clay Sirkey’s “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, consumerism is described beyond just a social negative; where, in this society, consumer culture has become so ritualistic that it becomes a spiritual connection. This gives the characters a negative and unhealthy alternative to religion when faced with fear of death, making consumption a catharsis and a spiritual escape (an effect that Karen Weekes would describe as the negative aspect of “white noise” in her article “Consuming and Dying: Meaning and the Marketplace in Don DeLillo’s White Noise”). Kalle Lasn explains in “The Cult You’re In” that this is a common occurrence in modern society, where consumerism is nothing more (or less) than a cult. Don DeLillo uses White Noise as an excellent depiction of how modern American consumers, when faced with spiritual or existential crises, can tend to lean away from religion and replace it with consumption due to its assumed comfort and safety in the culture as demonstrated by both adult and child characters.

The reader first sees this existential questioning almost immediately, where much of the adult characters’ (specifically Jack) dialogue is driven by an intense fear of death. When examining the characters in White Noise and understanding their petrifying fear of death and the uncertainty that comes with it, it becomes somewhat more understandable why those characters turn to tangible and quantifiable things rather than spirituality. In contemporary culture, religion is scary. There is no surefire answer to the questions people have and there is no one religion that offers more answers than the rest. As a society, modern humans are raised to be comfortable with consumption because they are raised to be consumers. Kalle Lasn describes the idea of being raised into consumer culture as a kind of cult initiation, explaining that A long time ago, without even realizing it, just about all of us were recruited into a cult. At some indeterminate moment, maybe when we were feeling particularly adrift or vulnerable, a cult member showed up and made a beautiful presentation. “I believe I have some- thing to ease your pain.” She made us feel welcome. We understood she was offering us something to give life meaning. She was wearing Nike sneakers and a Planet Hollywood cap. The audience sees this idea surface itself throughout White Noise with Jack’s children. While his daughter sleeps, “she utter[s] two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica,” and Jack watches this. Not only is Steffie, a young child, having car commercials slip into her subconscious and surface in her dreams, but her father is also watching her sleep and say these words as if this were a sermon. Jack is left “feeling selfless and spiritually large” at his daughter’s simple utterance of a brand name vehicle.

Beyond watching his daughter sleep to hear her speak in car brands, Jack lives through several other transcendental experiences as a consumer. Where Jack would turn to prayer were he religious, he turns to shopping; when faced with fear of death or confusion surrounding life, Jack buys. On one occasion, Jack takes his family to the mall for an escape, where “he traded money for goods. The more money [he] spent, the less important it seemed. He was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off [his] skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to [him] in the form of existential credit. He felt expansive,” transcending normal human experience and expanding his awareness to everything and filling up all the space that he occupied. Unlike prayer, meditation, or other spiritual release, however, Jack leaves the experience emptier than he began, driving home with his family in silence, feeling apathetic. In White Noise’s introduction, Mark Osteen explains that “White Noise is thus also a novel about religion–or, perhaps more accurately, about belief… White Noise is such a book, one that alludes constantly to what lies just beyond our hearing, to the mysterious, the untellable, the numinous–to what DeLillo calls the ‘radiance in dailiness,’” where Osteen describes spirituality as an awareness beyond the average human buzz. Though Jack has this awareness with his “spiritual” experiences in consumption, the effects are not lasting, leaving Jack empty, apathetic, and with fewer answers than he had prior to the experience. This is what Karen Weekes would describe as “negative white noise”; though white noise (background noise and events) can be positive, the application thereof and result of that application is what can shift the white noise to be negative. So here it becomes apparent that not only has this ritualism of consumerism added a catharsis for their fears to a point of religiousness and spirituality, it has done it to such a level that it is unhealthy for any character involved; these experiences aren’t just replacements for religion, they’re insecure and empty replacements.

However, Jack is not the only one in his culture who experiences this struggle with the adverse effects of consumerism as religion. Much like religion, consumerism governs how the society following it functions. Consumerism just happens to function on the ideals of “How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes,” a self-serving and shallow basis for a society. When an entire society follows these ideals for its entire existence, norms and rituals are established. Though in its stagnant state the only issue is the self-serving and cult-like state (“only” being used in the loosest sense), when a norm or ritual is shaken the entire culture suffers. This is expressed extremely well in the final scene of White Noise– a supermarket where all of the shelves have been rearranged and the shoppers are found in confusion and near frenzy. This is like walking into a chapel where all of the stained glass has been shattered and replaced with images of Marilyn Manson. Their ritualistic consumption is tampered with, leaving agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. The scouring pads are with the hand soap now, the condiments are scattered. However, the need to consume overcomes this fear and confusion, where …in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly… A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The religion, the cult of consumerism is able to overcome this shaking of the norm because, in a world where belief does not exist beyond the tangible and “ownable,” one cannot afford to lose faith in consumption.

Don DeLillo’s White Noise is ultimately extremely successful in demonstrating the ways in which humans being cope when faced with existential questions and the lust for tangible answers. He gives a wonderful insight in regards to the modern consumer’s need to consume and it’s adverse effect when used in place of spirituality in transcendental experience. Through this novel, it becomes apparent that doubt, fear, and insecurity in ones’ self and future can lead to unhealthy worship of things that really mean nothing.