Family Values in Don DeLillo's White Noise
Patched together from different marriages, various mothers and fathers, the nuclear family in Don DeLillo's White Noise is nothing if not impacted and constructed by modernity. This explication of a typical American lifestyle does not examine the simplicity of daily life but rather the influence of outside sensory impact that impinges itself upon the nuclear family. The "noise" that surrounds and engulfs the modern family separates it from larger, universal issues that become muddled with the continuing barrage of information and confusion. Life and death become nothing but commodities, pieces of information, tossed into the slew of images, sounds and movements involved in modern living. TV, radio, food products, toxic waste?they enshroud the family, separating it from universal understanding to protect it, and, paradoxically, destroy it. For Jack and his wife, fear of death is all that remains of survival.
Modern life, the implications of technology, capitalism and progress, all separate the typical nuclear family from such philosophical, spiritual understandings as the meanings of life and death. The toxic cloud, spreading its poison over Iron City and vicinity, immediately affects the community and the nuclear family in such a way that technology overwhelms humanity. Heinrich realizes his fifteen minutes of fame in the Red Cross camp where he discusses the dire fate of Nyodene D. victims. His father asks, "Was he finding himself, learning how to determine his worth from the reactions of others? Was it possible that out of the turmoil and surge of this dreadful event he would learn to make his own way in the world?" (131). The cloud of noxious, dead...
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... be influenced daily by the influx of sound and image. The nuclear family is not disconnected from technology; nor is it always engulfed by it. The modern family constantly struggles to maintain the balance of both emotional understanding and commodity influence; DeLillo, thorough his explication of violence and fear may believe that modernity is winning the race for control of the nuclear family.
Works Cited and Consulted
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Viking, 1984.
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There are many differences and similarities between The Scottsboro Case and the Tom Robinson’s case of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Some similarities between the two cases are that the defendants are African Americans who are falsely accused of a crime they never committed. This reveals that the cases were during the time where racism was at its worst. All the defendants were accused of rape and the two women testified against black men, like what Mayella Ewell did. And the judges were all white. Some differences are that the Scottsboro case included nine men, while Tom Robinson was the only man in his trial. And all but the 12 year old was sentenced to death, while Tom was shot later on after the trial. Lastly, after the state retried
In the play Antigone, I choose Creon to be the tragic hero because he is the King of Thebes and he looses everything he has. Creon being King makes the audience believe that something like that can happen to the King then what can happen to us. Antigone the niece of Creon, The sister of Polyneices was punished by Creon for burying Polyneces after his death, Creon has forbidden anybody to do so. Once Creon punished Antigone the blind prophet Teiresias told him that the Gods will take revenge for his actions, then Creon tried to change everything but he is too late. Creon's tragic flaws were his stubbornness, the abuse of power and the actions he took to cause the downfall of the Thebes.
Parallels and bias were shown in both cases, every racist witness showed bias to the black men who were accused. The major characters that were involved with the trial were similar too. Both Atticus and Judge Horton fought for the equal treatment of blacks in the judicial system as the whites. The accusers of the black men were similar too; it seems like the book was made after the actual Scottsboro Case. The time that both of the trials took place in were exactly the same as well. Every single aspect of both of the trials is the same except for the outcomes. One outcome was that they men got away which was amazing because it was real life and the other was more realistic that the black man was killed and the racists had their justice served.
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Don Delillo’s White Noise explores one mans emotional struggles, and his love/hate relationship with technology in twentieth-century America. The novel takes place in Blacksmith, a small college town with a college known as the College-on-the-hill. Jack Gladney, the narrator and main character, is known to be “a big, aging, harmless, indistinct sort of guy”(83) He is an accomplished family man, a professor at the College-on-the-hill, a husband wanting to please his wife, someone who struggles with the fear of dying. From technology to modern society, Delillo created the character Jack to show the impact of the media on our families and our society.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a fictional story in which a black man is accused of a crime against the daughter of one of the most hateful, racist men in all of Maycomb, Alabama. Though the book is considered fictional, it couldn’t be any more real. Nine black men were “hoboing” a train and ended up being accused of a crime against two white women and known as vial criminals throughout the south. This incident became known as the Scottsboro trial. Although the book To Kill a Mockingbird and the Scottsboro trial are very similar, they are also quite different.
Rice, Philip. and Patricia Waugh, eds. Modern Literary Theory. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP,
In To Kill A Mockingbird Lee tells the story of a Mr. Tom Robinson who is an African American who is being charged with rape against a white women. Atticus is the lawyer who must defend Robinson in court. In the Scottsboro case a central figure was a heroic judge who overturned a guilty verdict against the young men. The judge went against the public in trying to protect the rights of the African American men. In reading the novel you learn that Atticus arouses anger in the small community when he tries to defend Robinson.
Currently, families face a multitude of stressors in their lives. The dynamics of the family has never been as complicated as they are in the world today. Napier’s “The Family Crucible” provides a critical look at the subtle struggles that shape the structure of the family for better or worse. The Brice family is viewed through the lens of Napier and Whitaker as they work together to help the family to reconcile their relationships and the structure of the family.
One of the aims of Being and Nothingness is to describe consciousness, or human subjectivity. Sartre distinguishes two different modes of consciousness in order to accurately describe human subjectivity. These two modes are being-for-itself and being-for-others. Being-for-itself refers to a transcendent conscious being (Oaklander, 238). Transcendence is the antithesis of facticity. I will describe facticity first, in order to make the concept of transcendence more tractable. Facticity denotes the concrete details of the subject’s being including past decisions, plac...
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Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, advocates that there is a certain relationship between being-in-itself, matters, and being-for-itself, human beings with consciousness in his book Being and Nothingness. According to Sartre, Nothingness is a transcendent being, which means something lack, caused by asking questions.