XIV-Analysis of a Postmodern Work: Don Delillo’s White Noise

1. 1-Major Themes in Don Delillo’s White Noise

Title: White Noise

• Published: 1985
•  Author: Don DeLillo
•  Genre: Postmodern fiction, satire, domestic novel, dystopian elements

    White Noise is narrated by Jack Gladney, a “Hitler Studies” professor at College-on-the-Hill in the fictional suburban town of Blacksmith. The story follows Jack, his wife Babette, and their five precocious children as they spend their days attending school and work, watching television, browsing the colorful aisles at the supermarket, and going to the mall. In the second part of the book, the Gladneys become unmoored from their routine existence when a nearby truck crash causes a chemical spill that unleashes an “airborne toxic event” on their town. Lost in a new world of uncertainty, the Gladneys attempt to ground themselves through consumption. They feverishly absorb the flow of media images and information streaming from their radios and television sets, quieting their fear of death with the sounds of white noise. (Gilligan)

Themes

The Fear of Death

     The central concern in White Noise is the fear of death. When Babette admits her anxiety to Jack, she asks, “What is more underlying than death?” highlighting how deeply this fear is embedded in human experience. Throughout the novel, elements like Hitler, consumer culture, the toxic chemical spill, and even the ever-present background “white noise” all point back to this fundamental dread. Don DeLillo shows how contemporary society tries to suppress or distract from the fear of dying, but as Jack’s character illustrates, it inevitably returns, haunting and overwhelming us despite our efforts to ignore it.

      Different characters in the novel approach death in different ways. Jack approaches it with terror. Heinrich faces death dispassionately and analytically. Murray sees death all around him and remains continually fascinated and engaged by it. Winnie Richards notes that death adds texture to life, while Jack and Babette would give anything to avoid it. Though DeLillo avoids drawing any distinct conclusions himself, preferring to leave the novel in an open state, this close relationship between life, death, and white noise might mean that death lingers menacingly in the background of our lives, or it might mean that death, as an essential part of life, represents something we shouldn’t be afraid of. (Sparknotes).

The Tension Between Reality and Artifice

      Throughout White Noise, the authentic and the artificial often blur together, and substance seems interchangeable with surface. This confusion between appearance and reality represents an essential part of Jack’s own existence. Although Jack has created a professorial persona for himself, he remains painfully aware of the total fabrication of this character. Jack manages to hide the fact that he lacks the ability to speak German, a seemingly basic skill for the field of Hitler studies. Jack is driven to learn the language only when an academic conference threatens to expose his lie, not in order to study his subject more deeply. (Sparknotes).

      At the same time, DeLillo satirizes postmodern human beings’ inability to discern the genuine from the fabricated. The SIMUVAC, or Simulated Evacuation, is perhaps the most extreme example of the tension between what is real and what is artificial. For SIMUVAC, real events, such as the airborne toxic event which was itself caused by a derivative of an original chemical are used to prepare for later simulations, and later simulations are used to prepare for other simulations. In this environment, where technology allows for endless duplication, it becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain where reality ends and replication begins.

The Pervasiveness of Technology

        In White Noise, technology is portrayed as both threatening and comforting. It is ever-present, forming a backdrop to the conversations of Jack’s family, friends, and community. The steady hum of machines and the relentless flow of media sounds and visuals blend into everyday life. DeLillo shows how deeply technology is embedded in the fabric of modern existence so much so that the lines between human and mechanical voices blur, with the narrative moving fluidly between them. (Sparknotes)

Motifs

Plots

     Early in the novel, Jack states that all plots tend toward death. Jack repeats this simple statement several times throughout the novel, and it serves as a structural guide for the narrative. Since Jack is afraid of death, it seems logical that he would avoid plots, and indeed the story he narrates seems to meander, without any commitment to a straightforward, propulsive plot. Jack’s initial statement turns out to be true, plots do tend toward death. In that regard, the book’s structure was evident from the start.

White Noise

      White Noise, in keeping with its title, consists of a chorus of background sounds that hum throughout the narrative. The traffic hums, Babette hums, the supermarket is filled with endless sounds, and commercials and fragments of television shows continually interrupt the narrative. Jack perceives the world as essentially constituted by this cacophony, as a stream of sounds, some human, some artificial. Jack and Babette speculate that perhaps death is nothing but an awful, endless stream of white noise, and so white noise filters into the narrative and becomes part of it, just as death becomes part of nearly every conversation had by the characters. These noises are not simply the background sounds of life, they are part of life, the very substance of which our days are made. (Sparknotes)

The Question “Who Will Die First?”

     The question “Who will die first?” frequently recurs in Jack and Babette’s conversations and provides an insight into their relationship to each other and to death. The question enters both the narrative and their conversations, and it further puts the idea of death into the story. Jack and Babette claim to want to die first, because the burden of living without the other would be more than either of them could bear. The irony, however, is that each is so terrified of death that they can hardly bear to live.

Symbols

Supermarket

     In White Noise, the supermarket represents the myriad influences of consumerism on American culture. Portrayed by Murray as a “gateway or pathway” to spiritually charged levels of consciousness, the supermarket embodies the alluring quality of contemporary marketing and the power of the “psychic data” it projects onto the consumer. The shelves of products are full of this data, densely populated by branded labels, brightly colored packages, fine print, and loud product names. While Jack and his family visit this place to satisfy the simple necessity of buying groceries, their trips seem to also give them something more deeply existential, as if the supermarket has become a secular church, a place fraught with cultural significance. (Litcharts)

     Hitler

     Jack’s interest in Hitler as a historical figure relates only tangentially to the historical man, Adolf Hitler, and the genocide and war he instigated. The name Hitler evokes the horrors of the Holocaust and the widespread destruction of World War II, making him a powerful symbol of death. While Jack is consumed by his personal fear of dying, he comes to see that the immense scale of death associated with Hitler overshadows his own mortality. By immersing himself in Hitler’s image and adopting aspects of his persona, Jack tries to elevate himself above the fear of death, hoping that aligning with such a dominant historical figure will make his own fears feel less overwhelming or insignificant. (Sparknotes)

     The Airborne Toxic Event

      The airborne toxic event, caused by a train derailment, embodies the artificial, technology-induced danger that is characteristic of the modern world. The substance behind the event, Nyodene D., is a derivation of an original chemical, suggesting the terrible potential of mechanical replication. The symptoms and potentially lethal effects of the airborne toxic event are never certain or clear, and in that regard they are part of the “daily falsehearted death” of technology that Jack notes. This is our new symbol and the new face of dread, the modern death ship with its unknown and unintended consequences threatening the edges of our lives. (Sparknotes)

Theme	Explanation	Examples from the Novel
Fear of Death	The novel centers on characters’ deep, often unspoken anxiety about mortality.	Jack and Babette obsess over dying; the toxic event intensifies their existential dread.
Media Saturation	Modern life is flooded with constant noise from TV, radio, and advertising, shaping perception.	Dialogue is often interrupted by TV lines or commercial slogans; reality is mediated by media.
Consumerism	Consumer culture offers comfort but also masks emptiness and fear.	The supermarket is portrayed as a spiritual refuge; shopping calms characters.
Technology and Simulation	Reality is distorted or replaced by images, data, and simulations.	The toxic event’s data is more trusted than actual symptoms; simulations precede experience.
Family and Identity	Family is both a source of stability and confusion in postmodern life.	Jack’s blended family reflects modern fragmentation; his role as father is often ambiguous.
Language and Meaning	Language is shown to be unstable and insufficient to capture reality.	Jack teaches “Hitler Studies” without knowing German; conversations are often disjointed.
Authority and Knowledge	Institutions of knowledge (like academia or science) are portrayed as flawed or superficial.	Jack’s academic field is built on spectacle; experts during the toxic event contradict each other.
Alienation and Disconnection	Characters often feel detached from themselves, each other, and their environment.	Jack and Babette withhold truths from each other; emotional distance runs through family life.

 

2. 2-Postmodern Features in Delillo’s White Noise

      Don Delillo’s White Noise is a classic example of postmodern literature, known for its experimental style and thematic exploration of consumerism, media saturation, and the disintegration of the family unit.

     There is a distinction to be drawn between the terms postmodernism, the aesthetic style of art and literature characterized by traits of self-referentiality, pastiche, and fragmentation and postmodernity, the cultural condition of a society existing after modernity (i.e., after around 1980). Postmodernism arose as an aesthetic response to this new era of cultural development. By fictionalizing concepts from popular cultural theories, White Noise comments on life in postmodernity. More specif­ically, it investigates the “postmodern condition,” a new kind of malleable subjectivity emerging in our media-saturated world. Where Delillo incorporates elements of postmodern style in White Noise, he does so as a means of illustrating how characters’ subjectivities are colo­nized by media and consumer capitalism (“MasterCard, Visa, American Express”).

Simulacra

     Jack and his colleague Murray Siskind, a visiting lecturer on “living icons,” function as mouthpieces through which Delillo voices competing interpretations of postmodern culture. Jack represents a modernist whose quest for meaning and authentic self-definition, as well as his hyper-awareness of his mortality, displace him in a postmodern world. As Leonard Wilcox writes in “Baudrillard, Delillo’s ‘White Noise,’ and the End of the Heroic Narrative,” Jack “confronts a new order in which life is increasingly lived in a world of simulacra, where images and electronic representations replace direct experience.” Murray, on the other hand, represents a postmodernist who has enthusiastically em­braced this new order. He tells Jack that in the information society, there is no need to search for meaning beneath the surface of things that he should submit to the euphoric flow of the data, the information, the signs. (Gilligan)

      When Murray and Jack visit “The Most Photographed Barn in America,” a tourist attraction epitomizing Jean Baudrillard’s theory of “simulacra,” Murray explains the logic of a world where representation trumps physical reality. “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one,” Murray says. “Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? The accumulation of nameless energies” (Delillo 45).

      Delillo explores the notion of simulacra (something that resembles something else or, in other words, simulations) in American society. In 1983, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulations. He maintains that the postmodern world privileges simulacra over reality; we believe our secondary, simulated reality is more real than first-degree reality. His classic example is that Disneyland, a fantasy world, seems more real to us than the real world. Delillo utilizes this idea throughout White Noise, focusing on a nation reared on the simulated reality of the media which even had a former actor (Ronald Reagan) as President at the time. Delillo says the idea for White Noise came to him while he watched television news, and realized that toxic spills were becoming such a daily occurrence that no one the news cared about them  only those affected by the spills cared. We can see this idea play out in the airborne toxic event in White Noise, when people are upset that the media pays their crisis little attention, but it emerges in subtler ways when Delillo examines the consumerist, technological atmospheres of death we create for ourselves from our living rooms to our cars to our supermarkets (Gradesavor).

Postmodern Life

     Death hangs in the background of the pages of White Noise: in the supermarket, at the mall, in Jack’s nightmares. Delillo has cited Ernst Becker’s 1974 book The Denial of Death as an influence. Becker builds on the work of Sigmund Freud, Søren Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, and other thinkers to argue that human civilization everything we do in life to find meaning, or to escape through hedonistic pursuits is an elaborate coping mechanism to help us forget about our mortality. Characters in the novel cope with their fear of death by immersing themselves in the “white noise” of the media-saturated world. When Jack ruminates on death, his subjectivity seems to become more porous and postmodern. His thoughts are suddenly invaded by lists of brand names, as if the prospect of consumption grounds him. In these instances, Jack delays his feelings of existential dread by foraying into the postmodern condition. Delillo prompts readers today to reflect on what we are distracting ourselves from when we absorb meaningless information. (Gilligan)

      White Noise both satirizes quotidian American life and functions as a cautionary tale about diving headfirst into a high-tech, media-saturated world. With its complex tone and its elusive message, White Noise transcends genre. It does fit into the tradition of the “systems novel,” a term coined by literary critic Tom Le Clair in the 1980s to refer to novels that fictionalize concepts of systems theory. Systems novels depict worlds of interconnectedness, wherein characters’ words and actions are not governed by individual agency, but by larger forces operating in the ideological frameworks in which they live.

Pastiche

       One of the key elements of postmodernism is the use of pastiche, or the playful and ironic combination of various styles and genres within a single work. Throughout the novel, Delillo blurs the lines between reality and fiction, often presenting characters who are aware of the fact that they are living in a mediated world. In doing so, he critiques the role of consumer culture and mass media in shaping our perceptions of reality, a key theme in postmodern literature. The use of humor and irony throughout the novel also reflects the postmodern tendency to rely on playfulness and experimentation in order to subvert traditional expectations, as well as the postmodern interest in fragmentation, or exploring the disintegration and recombination of various cultural and language systems.

Identity Crisis

     Another postmodern element found in the excerpt includes the focus on the instability of identity and the breakdown of the binary oppositions that structure traditional modes of thought. In White Noise, characters frequently experience confusion and anxiety related to their identity, which is often closely tied to their fear of death. This theme is connected to postmodernism’s emphasis on the absence of singular or fixed meanings in language, which can lead to feelings of uncertainty and cognitive dissonance. (Exploring Postmodernism)

      Jack Gladney is a character in search of an identity. He describes himself as a college lecturer who “invented Hitler Studies in North America in March 1968” (Delillo 4). At the time, the college chancellor had advised him that his name and appearance let him down. As a consequence, Jack changes his name to J. A. K. Gladney: a “tag [he] wore like a borrowed suit” (Delillo 16). Equally, Jack has a “tendency to make a feeble presentation of self”, particularly his physical self. The solution, he tells us in his first person narrative, along with wearing the medieval academic robes of a departmental chairman, is to “gain weight” because: [the chancellor] wanted me to “grow out” into Hitler. [...] The glasses with thick black heavy frames and dark lenses were my own idea [....] Babette said she liked the series J. A. K. [....] To her it intimated dignity, significance and prestige. I am the false character that follows the name around. (Delillo 17) These gestures of self-hood are symptomatic of the decentering effects of post-structuralism and the consequent destabilization of identity in a postmodern world. Jameson describes this move away from the stable self as “the decentering of that formerly centered subject or psyche” (15). This decentering has the effect of liberating the self from the destructive forces of modernism and modernist anxieties about the distortion of individuality because “the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self-present to do the feeling” (Jameson 15). In the case of Jack Gladney, his original conception of self is evacuated by the stereotype of a college don provided by his chancellor (a man who is both large and successful) leaving a vulnerable sense of identity which will later be occupied by stereotypes drawn from popular culture. The conflicted individual, struggling against the chaotic world of commodified forces to construct a stable and coherent sense of who they are, is neatly embodied in the figure of Orest Mercator who wants to break the world record for sitting in a cage with poisonous snakes. Gladney describes how Mercator is “creating an imperial self out of some tabloid aspiration” (Delillo 268). What Jack does not see is that his own imperial self, the distant academic, is equally crafted with dark glasses and the robes of a departmental chairman.  (Brown 22-23)

     Overall, Don Delillo's White Noise exemplifies several key elements of the postmodern literary movement, including the use of pastiche, the exploration of media saturation and consumer culture, and the focus on instability and fragmentation. Through these devices and themes, the novel offers a rich and complex critique of contemporary life, inviting readers to question the assumptions and structures that underlie their own worldviews.

The table below summarizes the features of postmodernism in Delillo’s White Noise

Feature of Postmodern Literature	Explanation	Examples in White Noise
Fragmentation	Non-linear narrative with disjointed scenes and shifts in tone, voice, and structure.	The novel is divided into three loosely connected parts; sudden changes in setting and focus.
Irony and Dark Humor	Use of irony to critique serious issues like death, media, and consumerism.	Jack teaches “Hitler Studies” without knowing German; the toxic event is treated bureaucratically.
Pastiche and Intertextuality	Blending of various genres, styles, and references to other texts or media.	Mixes family drama, academic satire, and disaster narrative; echoes of commercials, TV shows, and history.
Metafiction	Self-aware commentary on fiction, language, or storytelling itself.	The novel questions reality through characters' reliance on mediated information and simulations.
Hyperreality / Simulation	Reality is replaced or blurred by simulations, images, and media representations.	The airborne toxic event is known more through data than experience; media defines perception.
Paranoia	Anxiety or distrust of systems, institutions, or even reality itself.	Jack becomes paranoid about his exposure to Nyodene D and fears dying from it.
Technoculture and Media Saturation	Focus on the influence of mass media, advertising, and technology on thought and behavior.	Constant background of TV, radio, and supermarket announcements; media shapes identity.
Loss of Grand Narratives	Distrust of overarching explanations like religion, science, or progress.	Characters turn to pills, pop culture, or consumer goods for comfort instead of traditional beliefs.
Ambiguity and Unresolved Endings	Resistance to clear conclusions or moral certainties.	The novel ends without clear resolution; death remains an open question.
Blurring of High and Low Culture	Mixing of elite and popular culture in both form and content.	Scholarly discussions of Hitler coexist with supermarket scenes and soap-opera-like dialogues.