Don DeLillo's novel White Noise

The central character is Jack Gladney, chairman of Hitler Studies at a university in the Midwest. Jack is obsessed by death, a subject he can indulge in his studies of Hitler and the Holocaust. Jack fears death, and he believes that studying Hitler will give him the courage to live his life instead of obsessing about his death. He also seeks to find life in the company of his family. However, death invades his life more directly when a cloud of toxic gas threatens him and his family, and after being affected by the gas, he becomes a thief and murderer, defeating his own death by stealing the lives of others.

The beginning of the novel concentrates on delineating the life Jack leads and the way he fears death, linking this to his studies of Hitler. He is in the process of learning German because there is to be a Hitler conference soon at the college, with real Germans in attendance. His family has its own way of following the obsession of the father and of engaging in their own battle against death. His son, Heinrich, has a friend names Orest who is training to break the world endurance record for sitting in a cage of deadly snakes.

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often coopted by rock groups of a certain type in order to shock and differentiate the group from mainstream America. The way DeLillo presents American life shows how this society is obsessed with images of both good and evil, often using an image until it no longer represents anything but itself. Jack and Murray drive to a tourist attraction called "the most photographed barn in America" (12), and when they get there, the barn is so surrounded by signs proclaiming its importance that you cannot see the barn itself. The all-pervasive power of television is shown as giving America a degree of empowerment cited by Murray: You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. There is light, there is sound (51). Indeed, there is life, and the novel shows how Americans seek life in technology and seek to preserve life by preserving the image, which creates a confusion all its own for Jack when he sees Babette on television: The face on the screen was Babette's. Out of our mouths came a silence as wary and deep as an animal growl. Confusion, fear, astonish
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1352
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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