White Noise

Babette Gladney is Jack’s fourth and current wife. She is a homemaker who cares for the family’s four children, all of whom are from previous marriages. At night she teaches classes on posture and nutrition to the elderly and reads to a blind man named Mr. Treadwell. Her guileless and loving nature deeply endear her to Jack, who considers her less high-strung and conspiratorial than his ex-wives. She is a few years younger than Jack and slightly overweight, but Jack considers her size to be representative of a sturdiness in character and demeanor, which he relies on for his own sense of well-being. She loves all of the family’s children but reserves special affection for two-year-old Wilder. She tells Jack, “Here are the two things I want most in the world. Jack not to die first. And Wilder to stay the way he is forever” (225).

Both her lack of guile and carefree nature prove to be a part of an elaborate facade. In truth, she too is overwhelmed by a fear of dying. Desperate for a solution, she enters into a sexual relationship with Willie Mink in return for an experimental drug designed to cure the fear of death. When Jack learns of this, he is devastated—less by the infidelity, which was purely transactional, and more by the realization that Babette is not the sturdy, honest, and untroubled soul he believed her to be.

Murray Jay Suskind is a professor in the popular culture department at College-on-the-Hill and the closest thing Jack has to a friend. An ex-sportswriter from New York, Murray speaks extravagantly and at length about the abstract underpinnings of modern American life. When not teaching, Murray spends most of his time watching television commercials and observing shoppers at the supermarket, sensing and documenting the transmission of hidden data and messages in each. He views the supermarket as a place of spiritual rebirth, likening it to a Tibetan way station that serves as “a transitional state between death and rebirth” (37).

While Jack questions the seriousness of Murray’s pursuits, he admires the man’s lack of bitterness and smugness compared to their colleagues in the popular culture department. Inspired by Jack’s success in Hitler studies, Murray hopes to construct an academic field of study around Elvis Presley. By Jack’s standards, Murray possesses a sanguine attitude toward death that allows for a belief in an afterlife or reincarnation without commitment to either. It is Murray who gives Jack the idea to conquer death by becoming a “killer” rather than a “dier.”

Willie Mink is a project manager at the pharmaceutical company responsible for creating Dylar. Until Chapter 38, the characters refer to him as Mr. Gray. According to Jack, he looks to be of Southeast Asian descent. Willie claims to have isolated the part of the human brain that fears death. When his employer prohibits him from conducting human tests, he enters into a secret arrangement with Babette to give her Dylar pills in return for sex. When this arrangement is exposed in the media, Willie is fired in disgrace. By the time Jack meets Willie, he is shabby and delirious, holed up in a dingy motel room and shuffling fistfuls of Dylar into his mouth. Prior to that, Willie only exists in Jack’s imagination as a “staticky, unfinished” (229) mass of gloom that threatens to swallow Jack whole.

Heinrich Gladney is the 14-year-old son from Jack’s marriage to his second wife, Janet Savory. Highly analytical and confrontational, Heinrich frequently engages his father in maddening discussions about the slippery nature of truth and perception. While skeptical of his and others’ senses and perceptions, Heinrich frequently accepts what he hears on the radio and television as a higher form of truth. For example, when Denise retches after the radio report already removed vomiting from its list of Nyodene D symptoms, Heinrich tells her she’s showing “outdated symptoms” (115). He is prematurely balding and has few friends aside from Orest Mercator and Tommy Roy Foster, the convicted rooftop sniper with whom he participates in a chess match by mail.

Denise Gladney is the 11-year-old daughter from Babette’s marriage to Bob Pardee. She is very inquisitive and often deeply suspicious, particularly of Babette’s suspected pharmaceutical use. It is her discovery of the discarded Dylar bottle that sets much of the plot in motion. She is also highly critical of her mother’s nutritional habits, nagging her to stop buying health food if she isn’t going to eat it. Her sister Steffie calls Denise “a little bossy” (36). Denise’s relationship with Jack is largely as his co-conspirator in their efforts to uncover the truth about Babette’s self-medicating. When Jack discovers the Dylar bottle and tells Denise about it, she takes it and throws it in the trash partly out of spite over Jack’s refusal to reveal what he knows about the drug.

Steffie is the nine-year-old daughter from Jack’s second marriage to his first wife, Dana Breedlove. The most sensitive of the Gladney children, Steffie refuses to take off her face mask for hours after they enter quarantine during the Airborne Toxic Event. She also struggles to watch television programs that involve characters being humiliated. Jack says, “She has a vast capacity for being embarrassed on other people’s behalf” (16). Later, she participates in a SIMUVAC disaster simulation, relishing her role as a fake victim.

Wilder is the two-year-old son of Babette, fathered by an unnamed ex-husband. Wilder has no dialogue in the novel, and while he is said to speak on rare occasions, Jack frets mildly over the boy’s development. On one occasion, Wilder cries for seven hours straight, giving Jack a strange sense of comfort. Spending time with Wilder is one of the only things that comforts Babette after the Dylar stops working.

Winnie is a research neuro-chemist at College-on-the-Hill. She is tall and lanky, and frequently blushes in conversation with men. She is extremely elusive, striding all over campus to avoid others. Despite her successes in research and academia, Winnie does not believe she is brilliant, although Jack insists that she is. Her main role in the novel is to assist Jack in uncovering information about Dylar and Willie Mink. She also tries to convince Jack that his sense of self is richer because he fears death.

Vernon Dickey is Babette’s father. He is an aging widower with loose teeth, a limp, and a hacking cough. He doesn’t fear death because, as he puts it, “[t]he mind goes before the body” (243). He supplies the pistol Jack later uses to shoot Willie Mink.

Alphonse “Fast Food” Stompanato is the chairman of the popular culture department at College-on-the-Hill, which is informally called “American environments.” Jack prefers Alphonse’s company and insights over those of the rest of the popular culture department, aside from Murray’s of course. It is Alphonse who posits one of the novel’s central ideas, that for most people there are only two places in the world: the television and the home.