White Noise as Satire

Don DeLillo's novel White Noise is a satire on American popular culture, and in it DeLillo engages in his particular interests in the meaning and use of language and in the deeper meaning of the commonalities of everyday life. In this novel, he turns especially to examine issues of the effects of technology on human life and society.

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.

Related Essays

Don DeLillo's novel White Noise Don DeLillo's novel White Noise is a satire on American popular culture, and in it DeLillo engages in his particular interests in the meaning and use of .... (1352 5 )

Contrast of 2 News Magazines .... Noise is apparently being reduced in residential areas by .... based political commentary and highly ironic political satire. .... make a run for the White House, much .... (4056 16 )

are 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American life shows how this society is obsessed with images of both good and evil, often using an image until it no longer represents anything but itself.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, fe

Category: Literature - W