Death In White Noise

Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise, follows Jack Gladney, his wife Babette, and their obsession with their own deaths. Although Jack and Babette do not share any children among the two of them, they have four children from previous relationships and marriages that bring the household together as one family. The family in this novel live relatively normal lives until an airborne toxin event infects their town, and they must be evacuated. Eventually, the family is allowed to return to their home and attempt to resume their normal lives, but the incident has increased Jack and Babette’s obsession with the fear of dying. Don DeLillo uses Jack’s character to emphasize the negative consequences of dreading death throughout a person’s life. Because there are several aspects about death that make him anxious, Jack continuously wonders and worries about his death. Initially, Jack is scared that his death will not be peaceful. Jack wakes up in the
middle of the night and thinks “Shouldn’t death, I thought, be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?” (DeLillo 18). Jack also fears that his wife, Babette, will die before him, because he does not want to be alone. Jack questions, “Who will die first?” (DeLillo 30). Jack is constantly consumed with these melancholy thoughts that cause him to become an example of someone who wastes their life because of the fear of not living. Not only does this create a theme in the novel but irony as well. This irony becomes more prevalent when Jack attempts to kill Willie, a man that Babette has an affair with in exchange for experimental drugs, because he is obviously against death. This reveals a sense of selfishness, because he is only concerned with his death. Nonetheless, DeLillo use Jack’s character to exaggerate that the fear of death only wastes time and possibly a life. A critical moment for Jack is when the airborne toxic event occurs.
Due to his exposure to the radiation, Jack has to face his fear of death. This event also causes magnificent, legendary sunsets that Jack describes with incredible romantic language. Jack says, “The edge of the earth trembled in a darkish haze. Upon it lay the sun, going down like a ship in a burning sea. Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery” (DeLillo 227). Although the sunset is beautiful, Jack admits that there is no point in fully describing it, because its ambiguity is so immense, it loses a sense of significance. Because Jack cannot fully appreciate the beauty of the sunset, he cannot completely understand the complexity of death. If the toxic event represents the fear of death, the sunsets represent a sort of great overcoming of the fear of death. Jack is able to come to terms with his own mortality, and the sunsets serve as a beautiful manifestation of unity between all the people in the town who all must face their own mortality in
time. To conclude, reader are left with further questions. Does the obsession with watching catastrophes on TV have something to do with Jack’s fear of death? Does watching others die and get hurt on TV help Jack cope with his fear? Why does he teach a class about Hitler? Is this another coping mechanism?