White Noise (novel)
White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
White Noise is a cornerstone example of postmodern literature. It is widely considered DeLillo's breakout work and brought him to the attention of a much larger audience. The novel was included in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels. DeLillo originally wanted to call the book Panasonic, but the Panasonic Corporation objected.
In late 2022, the novel was adapted by director Noah Baumbach into a film of the same name starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.
Plot
Set in the bucolic college town Blacksmith, White Noise follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor at the College-on-the-Hill who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitler studies. He has been married five times to four women and rears a number of children and stepchildren with his current wife, Babette. Jack and Babette are both extremely afraid of death; they frequently wonder which of them will be the first to die. The first part of White Noise, called "Waves and Radiation," is a chronicle of contemporary family life combined with academic satire.There is little plot development in this first section, which mainly serves as an introduction to the characters and themes which dominate the rest of the book. For instance, the mysterious deaths of men in "Mylex" suits and the ashen, shaken survivors of a plane that went into free fall anticipate the catastrophe of the book's second part. "Waves and Radiation" also introduces Murray Jay Siskind, Jack's friend and fellow college professor, who discusses theories about death, supermarkets, media, "psychic data", and other facets of contemporary American culture. Jack and Murray visit the most photographed barn in the world, discussing how its notoriety renders truly seeing the barn an impossibility, and later present an impromptu joint lecture juxtaposing the lives of Hitler and Elvis Presley.
In the second part of the novel, "," a chemical spill from a rail car releases a black noxious cloud over Jack's home region, prompting an evacuation. Frightened by his exposure to the toxin, Jack is forced to confront his mortality. An organization called SIMUVAC is also introduced in part two, an indication of simulations replacing reality.
In part three of the book, "Dylarama", Jack discovers that Babette has been cheating on him with a man she calls "Mr. Gray" in order to gain access to a fictional drug called Dylar, an experimental treatment for the terror of death. The novel becomes a meditation on modern society's fear of death and its obsession with chemical cures as Jack seeks to obtain his own black-market supply of Dylar. However, Dylar does not work for Babette, and it has many possible side effects, including losing the ability to "distinguish words from things, so that if someone said 'speeding bullet,' I would fall to the floor and take cover."
Jack continues to obsess over death. During a discussion about mortality, Murray suggests that killing someone could alleviate the fear. Jack decides to track down and kill Mr. Gray, whose real name, he has learned, is Willie Mink. After a black comedy scene of Jack driving and rehearsing, in his head, several ways in which their encounter might proceed, he successfully locates and shoots Willie, who at the time is in a delirious state caused by his own Dylar addiction.
Jack puts the gun in Willie's hand to make the murder look like a suicide, but Willie then shoots Jack in the arm. Suddenly realizing the needless loss of life, Jack carries Willie to a hospital run by German nuns who do not believe in God or an afterlife. Having saved Willie, Jack returns home to watch his children sleep.
The final chapter describes Wilder, Jack's youngest child, riding a tricycle across the highway and miraculously surviving. Jack, Babette, and Wilder join a crowd gathering to watch the brilliant sunset, possibly enhanced by the airborne toxic event, from an overpass, before Jack describes his avoidance of his doctor and the hypnotic and spiritual nature of the supermarket.
Structure
White Noise is written in the first person through the eyes of the main character, Jack Gladney. Jack is middle-aged and overly concerns himself with the inevitability of death. The first-person perspective gives the audience the ability to see Jack's true thoughts and feelings. The majority of the novel is written in dialogue, primarily focusing on the interactions between the characters and Jack's interpretations. Author DeLillo purposefully creates Jack's dialogue to be philosophical. The diction is not complex, but rather the sentence structure of Jack's dialogue is complex. Jack's character's dialogue throughout the story provides a better meaning than the other characters'.Setting
White Noise begins in the college town of Blacksmith. The exact geographical setting of White Noise is unidentified, but elements of the novel evoke the Midwestern United States, especially the Rust Belt and Upper Midwest. The fictional Iron City shares its name with the Pittsburgh beer company of the same name. Critic John Pistelli wrote that a Midwestern setting was "thematically appropriate to the novel's concern with the vanishing of labor and laboring know-how."Characters
Jack Gladney is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. He is a professor of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in middle America.Babette is Jack's wife. They have seven children from previous marriages, and they are currently living with four of these children. Babette has an affair with Willie Mink, whom she calls Mr. Gray, in order to obtain Dylar.
Heinrich Gerhardt is the fourteen-year-old son of Jack and Janet Savory. He is precociously intellectual, prone to be contrary, and plays correspondence chess with an imprisoned mass murderer.
Denise is the eleven-year-old daughter of Babette and Bob Pardee. She suspects her mother is a drug addict and steals the bottle of Dylar to hide it.
Steffie is the nine-year-old daughter of Jack and Dana Breedlove. She is a hypochondriac.
Wilder is Babette's two-year-old son, and the youngest child in the family. Wilder is never quoted for dialogue in the novel and periodically Jack worries about the boy's slow linguistic development.
Bee is the twelve-year-old daughter of Jack and Tweedy Browner. She lived in South Korea for two years.
Dana Breedlove is Jack's first and fourth wife and the mother of Mary Alice and Steffie. She works part time for the CIA and conducts covert drop-offs in Latin America. She also writes book reviews.
Janet Savory is Jack's second wife and the mother of Heinrich. She manages the financial businesses of an ashram in Montana, where she is known as Mother Devi. Before that she worked as a foreign-currency analyst for a secret group of advanced theorists.
Tweedy Browner is Jack's third wife and the mother of Bee.
Mary Alice is the nineteen-year-old daughter of Dana Breedlove and Jack's first marriage.
Eugene is Babette's eight-year-old son who lives with his unnamed father in Western Australia. His father is also Wilder's father.
Murray Jay Siskind is a colleague of Jack's. He wants to create a field of study centered on Elvis Presley in the same way that Jack has created one around Hitler. He teaches a course on the cinema of car crashes, watches TV obsessively, and cheerfully theorizes about many subjects, including media saturation, mindfulness, and the meaning of supermarkets.
Orest Mercator is Heinrich's friend who trains to sit in a cage with vipers.
Vernon Dickey is Babette's father who visits the family in chapter 33 and gives Jack a gun.
Willie Mink is a compromised researcher who invents Dylar.
Winnie Richards is a scientist at the college where Jack works, to whom Jack goes for information about Dylar.
Analysis
White Noise explores several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century, e.g., rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty academic intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and reintegration of the family, human-made disasters, and the potentially regenerative nature of violence. The novel's style is characterized by a heterogeneity that utilizes "montages of tones, styles, and voices that have the effect of yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America."Themes
Death
A recurring question that Babette and Jack constantly battle is, "Who is going to die first?" Throughout the novel, Jack's low self-esteem is noticeable. Jack believes that he is a fraud and he would have no importance in death. He believes his academic career is insignificant. Jack's battle with his fear of death is a constant conflict throughout the book. Similarly, Babette also battles death but in a different way. Babette takes Dylar in order to forget about the fear of death, whereas Jack acknowledges what death is and his fear of it. Although the couple's fear of death is different, it also permeates their lives and causes them to experience insanity and obsession. In a meta commentary on the role of narrative plot in storytelling, Gladney, and the novel itself, assert that once a plot is set in motion it only moves "deathward". All courses of action that center around a plan ultimately end in death. The novel illustrates this through Jack's crippling fear, and its highly fragmented organization of events and chapters. This fragmentation stagnates the plot compared to the typical novel, and for Jack's purposes, keeps death at arm's length.Academia
The novel is an example of academic satire, where the shortcomings of academia are ridiculed through irony or sarcasm. Critic Karen Weekes notes that the professors at University-on-the-Hill "fail to inspire respect" from their students and that "the university itself is 'trivialized by the nostalgic study of popular and youth culture by offering classes on Adolf Hitler, Elvis Presley, and cinematic car crashes. Critic Ian Finseth adds how "the academic profession... tendency to divide up the world and all human experience." DeLillo uses Hitler Studies as a way for the characters to deal with complex information, enabling them to cope with the intricacies of their society.Critic Stephen Schryer goes on to note the satirical way that characters in White Noise "lay claim to specialized knowledge that can be transmitted to others, regardless of their educational accomplishments or actual income". According to Schryer, the characters' vocations suggest "pseudo-professionalism", as if each can claim a professional expertise or outstanding intellect that " this class dependent on hyper-specialized forms of expertise." Critic David Alworth suggests that characters deal with unknowns like death via the "pseudo-professional"; they respond by pretending that they are educated to understand it.