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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.