Week 10: White Noise

Again, please excuse the tardiness. Things piled up and it took a while for me to catch up.

The main theme, or rather the entire "plot" of White Noise is death. While death is an accepted norm to life and is eternally present, this novel is fixated on it. The main character, Jack, not only fears his death, but also manages to make the reader feel dread in his everyday life as well. Throughout the novel Jack feels the white noise of consumer-driver life, which he defines as death, or, more specifically, the death of reality.

Modern life has taken on a false key in this novel. Jack's life is represented by his day to day actions which are seemingly ineffective and shallow. The beginning of the the novel has little to no plot, representing Jack's inability or refusal to cope with the reality of death. He hides inside the white noise of the supermarket or the television and only really feels silence in the presence of the dead. And while Jack yearns for an understanding of death to present itself while in the graveyard; free of white noise, he is incapable of finding it.

Jack hides behind his Hitler studies persona in order to lend strength to his life. He uses the German to lift himself up and when he ultimately abandons his German lessons the reader can perceive his movement closer to death, though he is still unable to recognize it. It's around this point in the novel that a plot begins to form. Death becomes more of a tangible reality than a foreign terror with the arrival of the black cloud of Nyodene D and climaxes with the drug Dylar.

While the plot (representing Jack's ever growing comprension of the pervasity of death) solidifies it seems that Jack's life falls apart. This juxtaposition between the reality of Jack's life and the reality of death symbolizes modern humannity's inability to cope with death. At the final climax where Jack shoots Willie, Jack has recognized that he himself has made a plan (to kill Willie) and has therefore accepted the presence of death in his life.

Though the ending of the novel seems to be a let down, the reality is that Jack can now, if not understand, at least comprehend the inevitability of his death. While life can still be heroic and meaningful, the sunsets are still mysterious and death is still looming in the future.