White Noise

Chapter 21 is the longest chapter in the book and also the most plot-heavy. The sudden introduction of very real danger into the suburban media-saturated calm of the first 20 chapters is startling but thrilling. This also supercharges the thematic messaging found throughout the first third of the book. For example, while TVs and radios have previously existed as a ubiquitous source of low-dose radiation, the messages they transmit now are urgent and immediately influential on the Gladneys’ lives. This is made most apparent through the radio’s repeated invocations of ever-worsening symptoms caused by the Nyodene D spill. After the radio says that vomiting is a symptom of Nyodene D exposure, Denise vomits. Jack cannot be sure if Denise heard the radio report about vomiting before she began to retch. Deja vu is later named as a symptom, but by the time Steffie complains of deja vu, that symptom had already been replaced in radio reports by coma and convulsion. This leads Heinrich to tell Steffie that she is suffering from an “outdated” (115) ailment. This is reminiscent of Heinrich’s refusal to trust his perceptions over the radio when it comes to weather reports, only here the stakes are much higher. For a time, Jack is almost more terrified of the radio signals than the actual event they describe. When miscarriage is named as a symptom, Jack wonders, “Could a nine-year-old girl suffer a miscarriage due to the power of suggestion?” (123).

Before long, Jack’s anxiety over news reports and radio signals gives way to a very real terror of the chemical himself. Jack’s fear of death, which until now has been mostly background noise, grows into a full-volume panic when he learns that he was exposed to Nyodene D while pumping gas. Before, death was an inevitable but external force. Now, “death has entered” (137), a reference to Babette’s hatred of the word “entered” in erotic literature. Though Jack’s relationship with death is more intimate than ever before, the graphically rendered (or “televised”) reading of his Nyodene D levels has a strangely sterile feel, making him feel “like a stranger in [his] own dying” (137).

While Jack previously relied on consumerist rituals or professional facades for comfort, this new level of panic calls for something more substantive. He is deeply comforted by watching Wilder, Steffie, and Denise sleep in the makeshift barracks: “Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God” (141). But even a child’s slumber is not safe from the atmospheric buzz of commercial slogans and focus-group brand names. As Steffie gives off indiscernible murmurs in her sleep, exactly two words coalesce into recognizable form: “Toyota Celica” (148). It is as if the “white noise” of the television set has infected Steffie, just as Nyodene D has infected Jack.

The power and limitations of mass media are further explored toward the end of the chapter, during the family’s nine-day quarantine in Iron City. A middle-aged man bemoans the fact that the national media hasn’t devoted a single word to their suffering. This echoes the cases of both Heinrich’s chess companion and the survivors of a near-plane crash. While the man lambasts the media’s thirst for disaster, at the same time he is angry that his specific disaster doesn’t rate as newsworthy, saying, “Haven’t we earned the right to despise their idiot questions?” (155). This frames television as the type of god that demands blind worship and loyalty but gives little in return, not even recognition of its subjects’ dignity and suffering.