DeLillo's White Noise

This paper discusses the ways in which the opening and closing sections of Don DeLillo's White Noise frame and exemplify the novel's main themes. By concentrating on minutiae and specific detail, DeLillo paints a haunting picture of modern life. His opening and closing incidents are superficially similar, but what occurs between them throws an entirely new light on the observable reality he records. In fact, DeLillo is not concerned with recreating reality but with questioning the ordinary, and these two framing sequences provide a dramatic contrast between the world as it is usually perceived and the perception DeLillo suggests might provide more powerful meaning to everyday life. DeLillo attempts both to record the "white noise" that provides the masking background for modern life and to cut through the background clutter to hear what lies behind it. It is a fascinating exercise.

White Noise begins with a description of a line of station wagons arriving at the start of the college semester, carrying the luggage, equipment, and families of the arriving class of students. He spends most of the first paragraph simply listing objects, right down to "the junk food still in shopping bags - onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut butter creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints" (3). It is an intriguing litany; by providing so much specific detail, he gives each item its own importance, while also echoing th

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joins the congregation in the supermarket, whose abrupt rearrangement becomes a metaphor for a modern world in which the signposts are constantly changing. Yet, the crowds ultimately find sense and peace in the checkout line, where the scanners "decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living" (326) and where the huddled masses gain comfort from the promises of publications listed at the book's beginning: "the National Enquirer, the National Examiner, the National Express, the Globe, the World, the Star" (5). Of these hallowed texts, DeLillo writes, "Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks" (326). This closing passage also echoes the title of the first of the book's three sections, "Waves and Radiation," a phrase which he uses initially to describe the means by which television images and radio broadcasts are transmitted through the air. Very quickly, however, it also comes to describe a process more central to DeLillo's overall theme, "some journey out of life or death, . . . some mysterious separation" (105). The people arrive to watch the sunset in waves, radiating uncertainty, awe, and a desperate desire

Category: Literature - D