Don Delillo's White Noise

In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney is a middle aged college professor that constantly thinks of death. To protect his from this death fear, he consciously uses his job as a college professor and his middle class status to deny the reality of dying. Whenever he is not thinking of death, it is often because either his surroundings distract him or he is using his surroundings as a distraction. White noise, an unmentioned, yet understood phenomenon that occurs in the book through road signs, magazine articles, and TV commercials. It is the constant influx of information that detaches people from their surroundings. When describing a supermarket, DeLillo depicts white noise as a “human buzz” that finds its way into the background of human
consciousness (,). DeLillo uses white noise to imply that humanity is growing numb to the world. Whether this is an intentional numbness or a numbness imposed on them, it is a distraction from death nonetheless. Many critics discuss the purpose of white noise in different ways. In Tom Leclair’s Closing the Loop, Baudrillard’s idea of Simulacra is relevant to the losing of a name Cornel Bonca says that white noise is “contemporary man’s deepest expression of his death fear, a strange and genuinely awe inspiring response to the fear of mortality in the postmodern world” (, 458). While, yes, white noise is more than the “cultural dreck of consumerism,” it is also not man’s response as much as the effect on man. White noise is not something man does, but something he passively lets happen to him. Karen Weekes shares a similar perspective of white noise. She points out that white noise can be helpful or hurtful depending on “whether it refers to an unremitting noise one is trying to escape or to the sound introduced as escape” (). Weekes is saying that white noise is either something the characters are trying to escape, or something they use as a means to escape.
White noise, as seen throughout the novel, surrounds Jack. It is in his TV, his family, and the washing machine, calling out to him whenever he is within earshot. His attention is always brought away from the conversation at hand to a sound within the house. Jack will often be on a certain train of thought in the novel, when he gets cut off by sounds such as “blue jeans tumbling in the dryer,” or Heinrich saying “Animals commit incest all the time. So how unnatural can it be?” over the phone (,,). These background noises occur at the same time as he is speaking or trying to think. By Jack taking note of all of these noises, he is subconsciously ranking sounds on importance. When he mentions the blue jeans, he is saying that that information is something he needs to know and that he should focus on. When this happens frequently with a wide variety of sounds, they are considered to be an equal intensity background noise. Jack is surrounded by these observations and they pull his attention in all directions.
With all these interjecting thoughts distracting Jack, he is unable to ever keep a singular train of thought for long. This is much like the conversations he has with his family, where they start out by talking about Dylar and end up talking about the population of Bolivia (,).Almost all of the information they relay to each other in this scene is false information except for what was learned from TV. They claimed things like that “[Dakar] is a country on the ivory coast of Africa” and that the capital of Dakar is Lagos (,). While there is some truth to these statements, they are filled with misunderstood information as well. The ivory coast is not a region in Africa, but a country. Dakar is actually a city in Senegal, not a country with the capital at Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. While these places were actual places, they were all scrambled in the wrong places. Later in the paragraph Jack and Murray talk about how families basically live in each other’s lies. So now we are aware of Jack’s understanding that his family is usually wrong. This nonsense conversation is the effect of the family living their lives in a way that allows for them to be distracted all the time.
False information separates Jack from reality.
Since he knows that he cannot trust the information he is hearing, then who is to say he can trust the information he is seeing. When Murray and Jack were going to see the most photographed barn their view of the barn was corrupted by all the signs pointing to and the tourists viewing the barn. Murray points out that Jack cannot “see the barn… Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” (,). Murray means that once you see the signs, you are not seeing the barn for what it really is. The barn is now important because of the fact that people make it important. The barn itself is disassociated from the image of the barn, much like Baudrillard’s Simulacra. Baudrillard says that Jack sees the world around him, but now he is separated from it as if he were watching it on TV. He does not see it as a problem that he has become apathetic to the world. In the insane asylum fire, Jack and Heinrich are sitting in the car watching the building go up in flames. When a woman walks out in front of them burning alive they barely bat an eye. They see the event in front of them, yet they react as if they were seeing it on TV like one of the other catastrophes they watch. It separates him from the horrors of reality as if they were horrors on the
TV.
The family believes that they are being lied to when their life is considered in danger. Whenever the Airborne Toxic Event air raid alarms were going off, the family ignored them as if they were not actually going to be in any trouble. Jack consistently claimed that they were “not going to die” and that they would be fine. At the beginning of the novel when the smoke alarm went off while they were eating dinner. Jack then writes it off as either a dead battery or that the house is on fire. A normal family that was not subject to white noise would go to check the alarm, at least to turn the sound off, but the Gladneys continued to eat their dinner without speaking to each other. The family’s life was in danger when the smoke alarm went off, yet they were so distracted that they did not properly process the danger they could be in. By letting the smoke alarm wash over them much like Jack did with Wilder’s cry, they were allowing for the alarm to numb them to the experience of death.
The distraction from reality that white noise creates is a useful tool for those that fear death like Jack Gladney. It creates a barrier that he can use to separate himself from catastrophe and more importantly death. At the end of the novel, Wilder rides his tricycle into traffic and two elderly ladies are watching the incident from afar. The ladies are “at first, not ready to accept the implications of the process unfolding before them” (,) for they are not exposed to the numbing of white nose. The women were shouting and waving, desperate to make a difference. However, as Wilder slowly makes his way across the highway, their expressions change from the yelling of a normal person to the apathy of Jack. They have grown tired of the world and have lost the urge to react properly. This is because of white noise. When talking about Wilder’s ride across the highway, Jack claims it “made them tired. The horns kept blowing, sound waves mixing in the air, flattening” (,). At the beginning of the scene there was no mention of any sort of white noise, however, once the ladies begin to be numb, the white noise is showing up.
White noise is the way man shuts himself off from the world. It is man’s conscious and subconscious ways of preventing the thoughts of death.