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. Babette, his wife, is lecturing on good posture. She also sends her name to a company that is testing a new drug which staves off the fear of death. the drug does nothing for her, but after Jack is exposed to the toxic chemical and told that he does not want to know what that means, Jack insists on taking the drug. His desire to avoid death is much-criticized by others who see death as the naturel end of life. Even Orest points out that there are more peo...