The Gladney family, in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise is an extreme portrayal of the "typical American family." DeLillo's portrait takes typical features of the American family--such as their lack of communication and their obsession with materialism
--and then, through hyperbole and irony, distorts them to sometimes barely recognizable extremes. DeLillo is not after a straightforward picture of the American family, but the radical portrait he offers rather wants to draw attention not only to the degree the purity of the family has been corrupted but also to the extent of the general corruption of the American Dream.
The bewildered and lost American family the author depicts is a part of a bewildered society which has lost its way. It is a family lost in a world of confusion and "white noise," and, especially, in the material things of modern consumerism. God and all spiritual hope have disappeared for all intents and purposes, replaced by a faith in the products of the consumerist culture.
Not that the family is without love, but when it is expressed it is idealized, as in this passage in the mind of the father:
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, the context of these thoughts is crucial. Jack's experience takes place in the midst of the "airborne toxic event," from which Jack is essentially powerless to protect his children or himself. Jack imagines that as he watches his sleeping children he has some power to protect them and their innocence.
Actually, there is little or no innocence or purity in the life of th...