White Noise by Don DeLillo

First published: 1985

Type of plot: Philosophical realism

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: Blacksmith, a fictional college town in the United States

Principal Characters:

• Jack Gladney, a college professor specializing in studies of Adolf Hitler
• Babette Gladney, Jack’s neurotic wife
• Steffie Gladney, their nine-year-old daughter, obsessed with health
• Heinrich Gladney, Jack’s son by a previous marriage, whom Babette fears will become a mass murderer
• Murray Jay Siskind, Jack’s friend, an Elvis Presley specialist
• Alphonse Stompanato, the head of the popular culture department
• Willie Mink, Babette’s drug supplier and seducer

The Novel

At once hilarious and horrifying, Don DeLillo’s White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family’s attempt to deal with the mundane conflicts of day-to-day life while grappling with the larger philosophical issues of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. The novel is divided into three sections. All incidents, images, and exchanges among characters in the first section, “Waves and Radiation,” culminate thematically in the second section, “The Airborne Toxic Event.” The third section, “Dylarama,” chronicles not only the direct effects of the “event” but also the indirect but even more profound changes in the way the characters subsequently see themselves and their world.

The novel’s first-person narrator is Jack Gladney, a college professor specializing in studies of Adolf Hitler. Many of the other characters are also in some sense observers of contemporary culture: Murray Jay Siskind, an Elvis Presley specialist; Jack’s other colleagues in the popular culture department; his son Heinrich, who translates technical information to his father and the reader; and his daughter Steffie, whose obsession with health has made her into an expert in drugs and medical matters. The bulk of the novel is less a sequence of important events than a series of dialogues concerning various interests and obsessions.

Immediately after the opening chapter, with its description of incoming college students—luggage, stereos, tennis rackets, and other equipment in tow—Jack goes home and discusses with his wife Babette what he has just witnessed. In the middle of the discussion, Babette remarks that she can hardly imagine people with such material wealth being concerned with death. The comment seems irrelevant to the subject at hand, and neither she nor Jack pursues it. DeLillo has subtly introduced a theme that will grow larger over the course of the novel, that of death, and how one can live in full knowledge of its inevitability.

The remainder of part 1 follows much the same pattern, with Jack and someone else discussing a phenomenon that at first may seem only mildly interesting (the ominously beautiful sunsets, some strange pills of Babette’s that Jack discovers) but that involve associations that acquire greater power through repetition (the environment, conspiracies of one kind or another, and, always, death).

The action begins to accelerate in part 2, in which a train derailment unleashes a noxious drifting cloud. The fact that no one knows much with certainty about the cloud—or if “they” know, they are not telling—adds to Jack’s and his family’s anxiety. Eventually, they leave their home and join a caravan of refugees fleeing the toxic event zone. Jack is briefly exposed to the cloud. The family finally is quarantined alongside hundreds of others in a large barracks. Nine days later they are allowed to return home.

In part 3, Jack and his family must deal with the physical and emotional effects of the toxic event. For Jack, the most tangible effect is a “nebulous mass” discovered during an X-ray examination. The mass may mean nothing or it may mean, eventually, death. Jack is equally worried about Babette after he finds a cache of Dylar tablets. He learns that the drug is designed to treat a peculiar neurosis, the excessive fear of death. After confronting Babette, Jack also finds that she has been “purchasing” the experimental drug by having sex with the sleazy Willie Mink. Jack confronts Willie, then shoots him, but not fatally.

The novel ends, appropriately, with very little resolved. Mink is in the hospital but apparently thinks he has shot himself. Babette still fears death, as does Jack, and the sunsets are still ominously glorious.

The Characters

One of the principal philosophical conclusions of White Noise is that people act less than they are acted upon, as victims of forces beyond their control or knowing. Appropriately, Jack, the central character, does very little in the novel. His one dramatic action is to shoot Willie Mink, but this has no more practical effect on the direction of the novel than the tossing of a pebble has on the course of a river. Jack sees, listens, thinks, and comments, but there is little that he can do. Mostly, he thinks about death and chaos in reference to himself, his family, and ultimately American society.

Babette broadens and intensifies the emotional impact of themes that Jack, early in the novel, considers mostly in the abstract. When it is discovered that the apparently normal Babette has been taking drugs (at the expense of giving herself to the contemptible Willie Mink), for example, Jack realizes that her fears are symptomatic of life in modern America.

Similarly, their nine-year-old daughter Steffie’s precocious knowledge of pharmaceuticals and health matters indicates her to be a budding Babette. At some point in the future she will become obsessed with death, if she is not already.

Her half-brother Heinrich serves a similar, although more complex, function. Like Steffie, he is precociously aware of the intricacies of modern technological society, his field of expertise being science and the media. Whereas Steffie is vigilant in protecting herself and her parents against potential harm, Heinrich is fascinated with and more a product of his culture. In one funny and disturbing scene, Heinrich and his father argue for three pages whether it is raining. Heinrich refuses to acknowledge what his senses clearly tell him because the radio weather report said that it would not rain until later in the day.

Murray Jay Siskind is involved in none of the major scenes in the novel, but he provides the reader, through his conversations with Jack, with insights into popular American culture. The scene in which Jack and Murray simultaneously lecture to a class on the lives of Hitler and Elvis, for example, is a comic and thought-provoking masterpiece.

Lecherous, amoral, rodent-like Willie Mink is modern society sunk to its sleazy, wretched low. He serves as a marker of the depths of American culture and morals.

Because contemporary culture is so vividly and convincingly rendered, DeLillo’s characters impress the reader with their individual realities. Their most important function, however, is to represent certain thematic positions or reactions to various aspects of modern society. They are less actors than voices in a symposium on life and death in America.

Critical Context

Although once almost a cult figure in contemporary American fiction, by the 1980’s Don DeLillo had carved out that most desirable of literary niches for himself, as both a best-selling novelist and an award-winning darling of critics. This position was cemented in 1985 with the publication of White Noise, a best-seller and winner of the American Book Award.

DeLillo has built his reputation on a series of novels remarkable for their variety of subject matter within a consistency of theme. Ratner’s Star (1976) is a science-fiction novel, The Names (1982) is a novel of political intrigue, and Libra (1988) is a historical novel dramatizing and offering a theory of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Not all are as funny as White Noise often is, but in all of them DeLillo shows himself to be a witty writer who can vividly invoke a cast of colorful characters beset by paranoia and the catastrophes of modern life.

DeLillo’s style is distinctive and his themes are consistent, so that one can identify a DeLillo novel after reading only a few paragraphs, despite the variety of subject matter. DeLillo nevertheless does not work apart from and outside literary tradition. His like-minded contemporaries and literary antecedents are more obvious than obscure.

The contemporary writer with whom DeLillo is most obviously aligned is Thomas Pynchon, who, in novels such as Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), dramatizes humanity’s precarious existence in a technological nightmare-world where conspiracy abounds.

Both DeLillo and Pynchon are inheritors of two recent literary movements, the Beat school and the “black humor” movement. The Beat writers—Jack Kerouac and Williams S. Burroughs prominent among the novelists and Allen Ginsberg most famous among the poets—lent their manic voices in the 1950’s and 1960’s to an outcry against a materialistic, soulless American plutocracy. DeLillo’s Jack Gladney would surely share their sentiments. The black humor or absurdist writers—among them Joseph Heller and Eugène Ionesco—offered less a specifically political and American agenda than a philosophical stance toward humanity and its condition: Life is absurd, and in the face of it all one can do, most often, is to laugh hysterically. All of these writers belong to the rich tradition of satirists who look unflinchingly at people and their pretentions, communicating their horror and humor to the reader.

Bibliography

Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Spring, 1990): 305-319. Aaron provides a general survey of the salient elements in DeLillo’s fiction. He addresses various themes and concerns under such headings as “catastrophe” and “conspiracy.” White Noise figures prominently in his examples.

Bonca, Cornel. “Don DeLillo’s White Noise: The Natural of the Species.” College Literature 23 (June, 1996): 25-44. Bonca examines White Noise as one of a few postmodern novels that has the ability to reach students and encourage them to explore the effects of mass media and the idea of death. Bonca describes his experiences teaching the White Noise and discusses recent critical work on the novel.

Caton, Lou. “Romanticism and the Postmodern Novel: Three Scenes from DeLillo’s White Noise.” English Language Notes 35 (September, 1997): 38-48. Caton examines the novel’s depiction of romantic attitudes despite the critical view of the novel as skeptical about an orderly universe. Catton asserts that White Noise questions the notion that people have never been confronted with the philosophical crises that they face at the end of the twentieth century.

DeCurtis, Anthony. “ An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Spring, 1990): 281-304. Especially important and interesting because DeLillo is generally so reluctant to speak or write about himself. Most of the interview focuses on Libra, then recently published. The last several pages, however, largely concern White Noise.

Edmunson, Mark. “Not Flat, Not Round, Not There: Don DeLillo’s Novel Characters.” Yale Review 83 (April, 1995): 107-124. Discusses how DeLillo’s characters reflect the modern self and challenge Freudian notions. Edmundson analyzes this method in several of DeLillo’s books, including White Noise.

Goodheart, Eugene. “Some Speculations on Don DeLillo and the Cinematic Real.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Spring, 1990): 355-368. Goodheart notes that DeLillo characteristically puts the “existence of the self into question.” This old theme is made fresh by the use of cinematic techniques that make the characters, even in their own eyes, two-dimensional. White Noise is discussed at length.

Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne, 1993. A thorough introductory study of DeLillo that covers DeLillo’s major works and includes a chapter devoted to White Noise.

King, Noel. “Reading White Noise: Floating Remarks.” The Critical Quarterly 33 (Autumn, 1991): 66-83. King begins with a theoretical discussion of the term “postmodern.” He concludes that White Noise is at once a “quite traditional novel” and a meditation of the postmodern. The novel shows modern times as an age of “distorted communication and information.”

LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. LeClair asserts that DeLillo should be acknowledged as one of America’s leading novelists. In this study, LeClair examines eight of DeLillo’s novels in detail from the perspective of systems theory.

Lentricchia, Frank, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. A collection of critical essays which are a solid overview of DeLillo’s art, and the social and intellectual context of his writings.

Lentricchia, Frank, ed. New Essays on “White Noise.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. This collection of essays provides an overview of DeLillo and his novel.

McClure, John A. “Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Spring, 1990): 337-353. McClure addresses the concept of the conspiracy, prevalent in DeLillo’s fiction. Historical currents are the stuff of romance; DeLillo’s modern heroes locate romance in espionage and conspiracy. McClure discusses DeLillo in a context of such writers as Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and Graham Greene.

Peyser, Thomas. “Globalization in America: The Case of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.” CLIO 25 (Spring, 1996): 255-271. Although White Noise is often seen as “obstinately domestic,” Peyser argues that DeLillo presents a disturbing vision of a globalized America whose cultural and territorial boundaries exist in theory only.

Saltzman, Arthur. “The Figure in the Static: White Noise.” Modern Fiction Studies 40 (Winter, 1994): 807-826. An analysis of DeLillo’s technique of flooding the main characters with information and cultural debris without compromising plot.