White Noise

In the first eight chapters, DeLillo establishes an extremely distinct tone through Jack Gladney’s narration. Jack is wry and insightful, and many of his insights are filtered through references to popular culture and brands. Yet despite the prevalence of these references, Jack is generally ambivalent about the cultural decay he senses in both of the worlds he inhabits: academia and the home. When discussing College-on-the-Hill’s popular culture department with his colleague Murray Jay Suskind, Jack says, “I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes” (10). While Jack is broadly dismissive of his wife Babette’s cultural diet—which consists of horoscopes, tabloid magazines, and erotic literature—he also adores the sweet simplicity of her nature and tastes. She is completely unlike his former wives, “who had a tendency to feel estranged from the objective world—a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community” (6).

Jack’s two lives—home and work—most frequently collide at the supermarket, which operates in the book as a public square. The supermarket is where Jack and his family frequently encounter Murray, who offers critical analysis of the packaging and brand slogans of various foodstuffs as if he were discussing great works of art. For Jack, the supermarket experience is less aesthetic and more philosophical, even spiritual. He hails “the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening” (20).

Jack’s craving for status and comfort is largely due to the character’s most defining quality: fear of death. Jack’s fear of his own demise will grow more intense, though at this point in the novel he manages to repress it with mixed results. In Chapter 5, he wakes up in a jolt and is reminded of his eventual death. “I seemed to fall through myself,” Jack says, “a shallow heart-stopping plunge” (18). This fear also drives a subtle but significant wedge between Jack and Babette. When they argue over who would miss the other more if one of them died, Jack agrees with Babette that dying first would be better than living alone. He admits in narration, however, that this is a lie. Jack laments that he and Babette are completely honest and open with one another about everything but Jack’s fear of death, laying the groundwork for future conflicts between them.

While Jack detests artifice in his personal life—he frequently denigrates his ex-wives’ enthusiasm for “plots”—his attitude is more complicated when it comes to his professional life. To establish and popularize the field of Hitler studies, Jack is advised by his chancellor to fabricate a formidable persona that’s presumably worthier of the subject matter than Jack’s natural identity. He wears thick glasses with dark lenses and renames himself “J.A.K. Gladney.” Jack puts more effort into his appearance than he does into learning German, a point of significant hypocrisy considering that a year of German is a prerequisite for his students. Jack only forces himself to take German lessons when an upcoming Hitler conference threatens to expose him as an unserious dilettante.

This tension between reality and artifice is also explored in Chapter 3 when Murray and Jack visit “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” Murray argues that it’s become impossible for anyone to truly see the barn as it exists, or rather as it existed before it was ever photographed. Instead, visitors see only the aura around the barn constructed from its status as “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” Murray says, “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn” (12).

Reality and perception are equally thorny topics for Jack’s son, Heinrich. Their argument in Chapter 6 over whether it is raining reflects Heinrich’s deep skepticism of what he can plainly perceive with his own eyes. He says, “What good is my truth? My truth means nothing” (23). Moreover, Heinrich intellectualizes the question to such a degree that even concepts like “now” and “rain” are called into question. At the same time, he accepts with little scrutiny the radio’s verdict that it will rain later in the day. This introduces the theme of mass media, which becomes more relevant over the course of the novel.