76 pages • 2 hours read
Don DeLilloWhite Noise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Fear of Death
Fear of death is the dominant theme that drives the novel’s plot and informs many of its characters’ motivations. It is the chief antagonist Jack and Babette struggle to overcome. This fear also frames other major themes and plots. It is the connective tissue that brings together the disparate strands of cultural references, analytical observations, and dry sarcasm that comprise the book. For example, Jack’s fixation on Hitler, a historical figure whom Murray describes as “larger than death” (274), is an effort to transcend death itself. It is the same drive that brought massive crowds to Hitler’s rallies in an attempt to shield themselves from death. But in the end, Hitler cannot save Jack.
Neither can consumerism nor his wife Babette, despite the comforts they provide Jack during the first third of the novel. This is before he learns of his exposure to Nyodene D. After, he says, “Death has entered” (136). And while this makes death less abstract, it also renders it more impersonal. Jack says, “It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying” (137). Here, death is portrayed as cold arithmetic, “the sum total of your data” (136). Elsewhere, it is described as “nothing but sound” (188) and white noise. It is part of the same fabric that makes up the ubiquitous buzz of television background noise and refrigerator emanations. It cannot be separated from the cloud of modernism, media, and technology that surrounds Jack and Americans in general in the late 20th century.
After exhausting his efforts to overcome death through personal, professional, and spiritual means, Jack takes Murray’s advice to conquer death through an act of murder. As the violent confrontation grows nearer, the white noise of death grows louder, and Jack believes he is in the midst of approaching enlightenment. But when his plan goes awry, Jack finds even greater reward in saving the life of Willie Mink rather than extinguishing it. It is unclear whether Jack’s sanguine attitude toward death will persist, but the events of the final chapter suggest that it may. Wilder’s blithe tricycle ride across the highway stands as a metaphor for how humanity might persevere despite continual threats and reminders of death. Moreover, Jack is untroubled by the town’s vivid sunsets despite the fact they are made so gorgeous by the same deadly chemicals threatening growths in Jack’s body.
Artifice Versus Truth
The novel explores the elusive nature of truth and authenticity nearly as often as death. It informs Jack’s fabricated professional persona, which Jack created to better establish a dignified and enlarged presence in the field of Hitler studies. While this may be seen as trivial or an uncomfortable but necessary means to an end, it comes at a sacrifice. The time Jack spends cultivating his persona leaves him little time to master one of the most fundamental components of good Hitler scholarship: learning German. Despite Jack’s deep shame over this, it is only when an upcoming Hitler conference threatens to expose him as a fraud that he buckles down and takes German lessons.
As Jack shamefully participates in an elaborate facade in his professional life, he claims a great distrust of artifice in his personal life. His ex-wives, all of whom are connected to intelligence-gathering industries, tended to involve Jack in domestic plots. What he loves most about his current wife Babette is her apparent lack of guile and carefree attitude. It is therefore devastating to him when Babette’s emotional and literal deceit is revealed, exposing her as just as much of a fraud as Jack’s Hitler studies persona.
Jack’s desire for honesty and forthrightness in the domestic sphere is contrasted with Murray’s theory that “the family is the cradle of misinformation” (81). Because facts so often contradict one’s feelings of security and comfort, family cohesion is only possible through either ignorance or willful dismissal of truth. While Jack is somewhat appalled by this subversion of what he believes holds a family together, he can’t help but find Murray’s logic persuasive.
The artifice-truth dichotomy is also persuasively explored during Jack’s excursion with Murray to “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” According to Murray, the artificial aura created by the barn’s status as a tourist destination is more significant than the reality of the barn itself, which is probably fairly ordinary. More importantly, it’s impossible to know how ordinary the barn is or isn’t because its status as “The Most Photographed Barn in America” has obscured its true form. Visitors don’t see the barn, they only see one another.
The Ubiquity of Technology and Mass Media
The term “white noise,” which Jack uses to characterize his pervasive fear of death, is also the white noise of television sets and kitchen appliances that envelops the characters’ everyday lives. Throughout the book, random disconnected lines spoken on television intrude on Jack’s narration. Most of the time Jack doesn’t explicitly comment on the onslaught of images and messages emanating from the TV, just as it wouldn’t make sense to comment on oxygen every time he takes a breath. There are notable exceptions when something on television reaches out and disturbs him. The American family’s appetite for disaster footage is one of them. When discussing this with Alphonse, Jack is told, “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is” (66). These domestic arenas collide when Babette appears on the cable access channel teaching her posture class, causing in Jack an extreme psychic disconnect.
For Heinrich and Murray, the media often represents a higher form of truth than one’s own perceptions. When Jack tells Heinrich that he should trust his senses over the radio, Heinrich launches into a diatribe about the scientifically proven fallibility of our senses. In Murray’s mind, the psychic data and messages transmitted by the television set—particularly commercials—reach out to some kind of primal collective memory.
Aside from philosophical underpinnings, technology has very damaging effects on the human body in the novel. Nyodene D, for example, is the byproduct of technological “progress,” in this case advanced forms of pesticides designed to increase crop yields. In conversation with Babette, Jack says, “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear” (154). Even Heinrich admits that computer technology has made knowledge into something intangible and useless. He tells his father that if Jack were sent back in time to the Stone Age, he would have nothing of value to offer the cavemen because technology has automated practical human knowledge so he doesn’t have to retain it himself.
Spiritual Fulfillment Through Modern Consumerism
Especially in the first third of White Noise, many of Jack’s most profound moments of elation come during ritualized consumerist experiences. In Chapter 10, Jack is overcome by “waves of relief and gratitude” (45) when he checks his balance at the ATM. At the supermarket in Chapter 5, the experience of filling his cart with sustenance achieves in him “a fullness of being” (20). Perhaps most dramatic is the Christmas shopping bonanza in Chapter 17, when Jack experiences the seasonal bliss of unchecked consumerism as a karmic experience, as he builds up spiritual credit with every purchase. But the highs of consumerism are always short-lived, and after Jack receives his Nyodene D diagnosis, they fail to provide the same level of comfort, even in the short term. After the Christmas shopping spree, the family experiences loneliness and isolation in the comedown. The upshot is that in the absence of earlier generations’ more substantive forms of worship, consumerism is a lousy substitute idol.
Elsewhere, Murray is fully invested in consumerism as a medium for psychic data and spiritual rebirth. To him, the supermarket is akin to a sort of Tibetan limbo that exists between death and rebirth. Moreover, the messages found in TV commercials and food packaging speak to consumers in ways he believes are more profound than what’s transmitted by news shows, scripted series, and movies. These messages are primal in nature, and therefore require adopting the perspective of a child to fully receive them.
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