Don Delillo's White Noise

1165 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Social effects of technology in society

In the midst of many themes, one of the things Don DeLillo seems completely preoccupied with is the constant reminder of death in his novel "White Noise". The inability to accept one's finite existence in a vast, incomprehensible universe is unquestionably an experience familiar to countless individuals. However, rather than discussing in broad strokes the inescapable mortality that ties together all of mankind, in a passage describing an exchange between Jack Gladney and a SIMUVAC technician, DeLillo criticizes the technology-filled world of the late twentieth century defined by reliance on masses of humming machines and faith in the incessant stream of media sounds and images. Technology, he avows, has fostered a material culture of consumption …show more content…

The scientific method upon which technology is based is defined as a method of observation or procedure based on scientific ideas or methods and as an empirical method that has underlain the development of natural science since the 17th century. It is now commonly represented as ideally compromising some or all of systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation, induction and the formulation of hypotheses, the making of deductions from the hypotheses, the experimental testing of the deductions, and if necessary, the modification of the hypotheses ("scientific method"). Naturally then, technology is designed upon a fundamental assumption of objectivity: observation at a distance in order to form legitimate conclusions, to construct knowledge of an "invisible... impressive... disquieting" truth (46). Jack's mind is accustomed to detect "codes, countercodes, social histories...hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material" (37) on a theoretical level. But as Jack states, "When your death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak,..you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself" (141). Death, when it becomes an imminent part of Jack's awareness, ceases to be a "professional matter" (74). Doctors become modern high priests, the only member of society capable of decoding the "network of symbols, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods" (141). Death in Jack's mind starts to take on a body of its own, or as Jack discloses, he becomes "a stranger in [his] own dying" (141). Progressively, Jack is starting to feel like death is something observable and quantifiable, a whole organism distinct from himself. This belief pulls Jack further from reality because death is not

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Kevin Brockmeier's The Year Of Silence

    886 Words  | 2 Pages

    Silence — the sound of quiet, the state of mind, the lack of meaning — all these pertain to its definition. Communication is expanding, noise is increasing, music is becoming more obtainable as people search desperately for a moment of peace or a breeze of silence. As the scarcity of physical silence increases, its value as a rare commodity increases as well. The idiom “Silence is golden” may perhaps only grow closer to reality as time passes, as exemplified by the white noise machines or silent fans entering the market and fictionalized in Kevin Brockmeier’s short story, “The Year of Silence.” In light of this, Brockmeier explores the value of silence and noise in his story without putting one above the other. Through strange clues and hidden

    Read More

  • M. T Anderson Feed Essay

    673 Words  | 2 Pages

    M.T Anderson’s novel Feed gives readers a representation of a future dystopian world, one in which technology is not simply around us yet embedded inside our heads. Anderson gives a warning for our own society by drawing parallels between our society and the feed. As Anderson describes, "Everything's dead. Everything's dying." (Anderson 180). In this dystopian world, the environment turns into a disaster due to how rapidly technology is advancing, and this concept can relate to our society today. Indeed, society’s life has improved over the decades due to technological advances, however, it brings more damage to the earth.

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of The Great Influenza By John M Barry

    596 Words  | 2 Pages

    While discussing the unknown frontier that scientists must endure, Barry describes a “wilderness region” that is unfamiliar and new. He continues to say that scientists venture “through the looking glass” into a new frontier. These devices help to create familiar ideas that the audience will understand in an unfamiliar situation. A simile used to compare research to a “crystal” by explaining that “probing” was to “ precipitate an order out of chaos,” much like a crystalline structure forms an ordered structure. Finally, Berry implements a metaphor in order to describe what follows a discovery. He describes “a flood of colleagues” that “ pave roads over the path laid.” This metaphor describes how science continuously changes, one discovery after another while ultimately communicating the patience and curiosity a scientist must have. The culmination of these figurative devices teach a new way of an audience that is unfamiliar with the author's theme.

    Read More

  • There Are Delicacies By Earle Birney Analysis

    1404 Words  | 3 Pages

    Poetry is a part of literature that writers used to inform, educate, warn, or entertain the society. Although the field has developed over the years, the authenticity of poetry remains in its ability to produce a meaning using metaphors and allusions. In most cases, poems are a puzzle that the reader has to solve by applying rhetoric analysis to extract the meaning. Accordingly, poems are interesting pieces that activate the mind and explore the reader’s critical and analytical skills. In the poem “There are Delicacies,” Earle Birney utilizes a figurative language to express the theme and perfect the poem. Specifically, the poem addresses the frangibility of the human life by equating it to the flimsy of a watch. Precisely, the poet argues that a human life is short, and, therefore, everyone should complete his duties in perfection because once he or she dies, the chance is unavailable forever.

    Read More

  • Robert J. Kastenbaum's Death, Society, And Human Experiences

    1011 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the United States and worldwide people have different culture, beliefs and attitude about death. Over the past years, death is an emotional and controversy topic that is not easy to talk about. Everyone have a different definition of what is death and when do you know that a person is really dead. In the book Death, Society, and Human Experiences by Robert J. Kastenbaum demonstrates that you are alive, even when doctors pronounce you dead.

    Read More

  • Pat Mora's Sonrisas

    1159 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Pat Mora’s “Sonrisas,” A woman tells the audience that she lives in between two worlds: her vapid office workplace and a kitchen/break-room with family members or colleagues of her same heritage. Mora includes many sensory details to enrich our understanding of the speaker’s experience in both “rooms.” The speaker is content living in the “hallway” between the two rooms because she can put on a metaphorical mask, as mentioned in Jungian psychology, which fits what is acceptable to the different social society that is in each room of her life. Adrienne Rich on the other hand, is not content with peeking her head into the doorframes of the roles she must play in order to be accepted. In her poem, “Diving into The Wreck,” she pursues, in my opinion, a form of individuation by diving into the wreck of her inner consciousness to find who she is among the wreckage of the world and its effects on her. Both Pat Mora and Adrienne Rich explore the dangers of being defined by others and the rewards of exploring different worlds.

    Read More

  • Higher Ground: Marxism in DeLillo's White Noise

    1848 Words  | 4 Pages

    According to Raymond Williams, “In a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes …” (Rice and Waugh 122). His work titled, Marxism and Literature expounded on the conflict between social classes to bridge the political ideals of Marxism with the implicit comments rendered through the text of a novel. “For the practical links,” he states “between ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’ and the ‘production of real life’ are all in this material social process of signification itself” (133). Williams asserts that a Marxist approach to literature introduces a cross-cultural universality, ensuingly adding a timeless value to text by connecting creative and artistic processes with the material products that result. Like Williams, Don DeLillo calls attention to the economic and material relations behind universal abstractions such as aesthetics, love, and death. DeLillo’s White Noise brings modern-day capitalist societies’ incessant lifestyle disparity between active consumerists and those without the means to the forefront of the story’s plot. DeLillo’s setting uses a life altering man-made disaster in the suburban small-town of Blacksmith to shed light on the class conflict between the middle class (bourgeoisie) and the working poor (proletariat). After a tank car is punctured, an ominous cloud begins to loom over Jack Gladney and his family. No longer a feathery plume or a black billowing cloud, but the airborne toxic event—an event that even after its conclusion Jack cannot escape the prophecy of his encroaching death. Through a Marxist reading of the characterization of Jack Gladney, a middle-aged suburban college professor, it is clear that the overarching obsession with death operates as an...

    Read More

  • Ears Have Walls by Steven Connor

    1324 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...died hands buffet and slap His head and a scorner spits in His Face. The slapping hands are frozen in mid-air and thus trigger associations with regard to noise. This association with noise is also shown in the scorner’s spit and how it suddenly stops before it reaches Christ’s halo: In order to perceive a sound in its reality, we require the space of silence, not of carnival. Glasmeier believes that this is precisely what John Cage does in 4’33’’. There is a suggestion of noise in Cage’s work just like in Angelico’s. The performer of 4’33’’ approaches the instrument three times, giving the instrument the possibility of noise without the reality of that noise: the viewer becomes the performer, imagining how that noise may be articulated. This is just like how a blank sheet of music still embodies music without ever being played; it triggers associations with sound.

    Read More

  • Conflicts In White Noise, By Don Delillo

    839 Words  | 2 Pages

    White Noise is a novel written by Don DeLillo in 1985. This novel is based around the life of the main character, Jack Gladney and his family. At the beginning of the novel, Jack’s life is very dull and at a standpoint until one day due to an accident, a toxic gas has been released into the air. This situation changes the way his family lives and thinks and several secrets are revealed. Throughout the book, Jack faces many conflicts with himself that contribute to the way he thinks and reacts to things around him. Jack, who is also the narrator, occasionally finds deep meaning in random happenings and objects in order to understand his world better. This is caused by the obsessive age with social media, which he finds meaningless and tries

    Read More

  • Television Language of White Noise

    1720 Words  | 4 Pages

    By coding his novel, White Noise, as if it were a television show, DeLillo comments on the state of affairs in our modern culture. DeLillo demonstrates our society's codependency on what was originally only intended to be a medium of communication. By showing the benevolence of the medium as it translates into the lives of his characters, DeLillo is saying that maybe our dependence on television, even as blood bath entertainment is not as bad as generally perceived.

    Read More

  • American Consumerism: Don Delilo’s White Noise

    1908 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Don Delilo’s, White Noise different themes are displayed throughout the novel. Some themes are the fear of death, loss of identity, technology as the enemy, and American consumerism. The society represented in the novel views people as objects and emotionally detached from many things. Death is always in the air and trapped in peoples mind. The culture that’s represented in the novel adds to the loss of individualism, but also adds to the figurative death of the characters introduced in the novel.

    Read More

  • White Noise

    1310 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Don DeLillo’s eighth novel: White Noise, warmly accepted by critiques, the author exposes, that the money gained colossal meaning during our time, plunging down other values like freedom of customer choice and respect for shoppers. In his work of fiction he illustrates how current world of commerce impacts our minds by manipulating our decisions, and also he indicates that a human nature demonstrates immense vulnerability for such attack. Moreover the ubiquitous commercials lead us to desire of having things we never tried before, to see things not worth seeing, to buy stuff we really do not need. The novelist tries to open our eyes to identify and understand how works this commercial destructive mechanism.

    Read More

  • Videotape: Don DeLillo’s Illustration of Postmodernism

    1087 Words  | 3 Pages

    Don DeLillo’s ‘Videotape’ is a short story of man who is absolutely captivated by some footage on the news that can be described as both, raw and shocking. The footage is being repeatedly played over and over. It depicts a young girl with a camcorder travelling in the backseat of her family’s car who happens to be filming a man driving a Dodge behind them. She continues aiming the camera at the man and filming until, suddenly, he is shot and murdered. The man watching the tape at home is clearly mesmerized and fascinated with the footage to the extent that he was trying to get his wife to watch it with him. This story portrays society’s utter fascination of shocking and disturbing content relating to death and other horrible events unless they themselves are involved. This, along with other characteristics, clearly suggests that “Videotape” is a piece of postmodern literature. This report will analyze and describe why “Videotape” belongs to postmodern literature through the in-depth analysis of the selected passage and a brief breakdown of the story as a whole.

    Read More

  • The Third Policeman: A Lesson in Absurdity

    1575 Words  | 4 Pages

    ... the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. O’Brien asks the question, If life is absurd and meaningless, why couldn’t death be absurd and meaningless? To tie this back to consciousness, O’Brien shows that just because it cannot be seen, how do we know it doesn’t exist? All of Freud’s findings are essentially as meaningless as the world O’Brien has created; an existentialist world of chaos and that the notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world beyond what meaning we give to it. It is O’Brien’s introduction to the world of bicycles having characteristics of humans and boxes, so tiny they camnnot be seen, and elevators into eternity, we are asked to suspend disbelief and understand O’Brien’s satire.

    Read More

  • Is Scientific Progress Inevitable?

    980 Words  | 2 Pages

    Scientific technology as a knowledge system is a powerful spiritual force, it helps people to keep the internal laws of the world know the real face and overcome to get rid of all outdated fallacious things. It also does not worship any idols superstitious that always gifted elimination, inferior and always full of innovation and creativity. This inherent ethos of science and technology would inevitably lead people to the way of thinking of dynamic, creative and revolutionary, which making modern never meet, keep making progress. Scientific, as a culture, can provide value in understanding the cultural, ideological, intellectual and aesthetic aspects.

    Read More

More about Don Delillo's White Noise

Open Document