yota Celica" (155). For the citizen of the modern world, Kabooms and Mystic mints are, in fact, holy words, representing greater concepts and spiritual experiences and invoked in the air in supplication of better, richer lives beyond the individual grasp.
As a purely literary device, DeLillo's list provides a clear picture of the diverse interests and casual wealth of the arriving students without the necessity of creating specific characters who will ultimately be unimportant to the story he is telling. Although the novel takes place on a Midwestern college campus and concerns Jack Gladney, a professor on staff there, the professor's students play no role in the narrative, and DeLillo wastes no time trying to make even one of them a flesh and blood character. Therefore, his listing of the things they bring with them, the kinds of people who deliver them to the campus, and the physical surroundings where they arrive provides an expert sketch of Gladney's environment while suggesting that the individual students are not important to either the story or to Gladney himself.
Yet his list also serves a deeper purpose, establishing the approach he is taking to the whole story. One of his central characters, Murray, is concerned with pop culture influence, watching movies and making endless notes, as though the notes themselves were the reality he is recording, and DeLillo uses this approach, as well. When an industrial accident near the town causes what authorities eventually term "the airborne toxic event," the changing litany of expected symptoms of exposure - at one point, "nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath" (111), at another, "convulsions, coma, miscarriage" (121) - sounds the same as the lists of brand names - "Krylon, Rust-Oleum, Red Devil" (159) - and snippets of conversations - "'Virgin acrylic,' she said into the phone" (49) - that pepper his text.
Murray argues, "Look at the wealth of data . . . in the bright packa...