White Noise written by Don DeLillo is a novel which looks on a professor’s year in life whose name is Jack Gladney. The professor has pioneered the area of Hitler Studies though does not know how to speak German. White Noise makes an exploration of a number of themes which were evident in the mid twentieth century and towards the end of the century like media saturation, underground conspiracies, family re-integration and disintegration, rampant consumerism, novelty intellectualism and the positive human violence virtues.
The style of the novel is a characteristic of a heterogeneous writing making use of montages of styles, tones and voices having the effect of putting together wild humor and terror as the important modern American tone. The application of a stylistic montage rather than a conservative chronology of events reflect the fear of plots by the narrator. Jack is asking: “Who will die first?”. Many chapters in the novel are short and have very little narrative connection to one another. The plots explicit terror, politics, love, narration and games for children.
White noise tackles on the topic of “fear of death” which is indisputably the most feared discussion in human existence. Fear apparently is the controlling point in Jack and Babette. There is a constant war of fighting death and its fear. Life thus slips on both sides and there is no chance to live a full life. Post modernism tackles the subject of death and fully exploits mortality definition as seen by the modern industrialized world. White Noise is a weird story. In conclusion, White Noise exemplifies people’s desperate attempts through the imagery of post modernity.
The author describes death as an assailant creeping into the society’s sub-consciousness although is deterred from tainting life gratification through the postmodern technology of the army and ultimately, immortality may be realized in the supermarket. As written by DeLillo, Jack Says, They were my guides for endless well-being… I shopped with reckless abandon… I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed.
