White Noise & One Hundred Years of Solitude

This study will examine two novels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Don DeLillo's White Noise, focusing on the extent to which the two books suggest that "truth" can be found. The first obvious point is that the "truth" which these two postmodern books are concerned is not a conventional or traditional truth. In the first place, the two works are novels, which means that the realities depicted are invented by the authors. In the second place, the two works are postmodern novels, which means, in part, that the fictional realities they depict are another step removed from conventional reality, or traditional "truth."

The modernist . . . perspective presupposes the possibility of objectivity grounded in fundamental, intrinsic, and universal (or classic) transcendent values and essential, autonomous, and self-sufficient objects, texts, and actions (Stiles and Selz 2-3).

In other words, the modernist tradition holds that "truth" is an objective reality, that there is a deeper meaning to life, and that such meaning can be discovered through art.

The postmodern perspective, on the other hand, in general holds the opposite belief, that there is no objective meaning to be discovered, and the individual artist cannot even discover his own identity in art:

The advent of postmodernist contingency placed modernist objectivity in doubt. Identity and human subjectivity were no longer understood as unified but rather were viewed as p

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t he is like others in his imprisonment in the same materialistic, consumerist culture. In other words, in a sense, the book portrays the modern world as a place where the only truth is lies, and the only escape from those lies is death. One image does give Jack something of a sense of the religious, which otherwise is generally absent entirely from his life. That image is an image of innocence, the innocence of his sleeping children: I wanted to be near the children, watch them sleep. Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God. If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially (DeLillo 147). Of course, this experience takes place in the midst of the "airborne toxic event," from which Jack is essentially powerless to protect his children or himself. Even without this event, the world is a place of lost innocence, of lost meaning, of lost tenderness. A sleeping child embodies such innocence, meaning and tenderness, especially a sleeping girl who is all the more vulne

Category: Literature - W