An Analysis Of The Fear Of Death In Don Delillo's White Noise

DeLillo is one of the most outstanding and influential writers in contemporary America, and he had a wide readership, but his novels did not reach wide readership until the publication of the National Book Award-winning White Noise in 1985.White Noise is an example of postmodern literature. This book follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitler Studies. He has been married five times to four women and has a brood of children and stepchildren (Heinrich, Denise, Steffie, and Wilder) with his current wife, Babette. Jack and Babette are both extremely afraid of death; they frequently wonder "who will die first?"White Noise explores several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century, e.g., rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the potentially positive virtues of human violence. The title "white noise" is a metaphor pointing to the confluence of all of those aforementioned symptoms of postmodern culture that in their coming-together make it very difficult for an individual to actualize his or her ideas and personality and a play on the idea that many of these symptoms are created by and for the disproportionally "loud" demographic of "white" middle class consumers.This paper mainly analyzes from three aspects the works White Noise by Don DeLillo. especially for characters'fear of death, their measures to overcome death and the reasons of their fear, work through the main character Jack and his wife's fear of death and all kinds of weird and funny measures they made to against the fear of death, in order to reveal the rapid development of postmodern industrial society brings the hidden dangers to the human beings, such as consumer culture, mass media, and even technology and the loss of faith. At the meanwhile probed the profound meanings of "The American Book of the Death":the highly development the post-modern society, the prosperity of the supermarkets, the transmission of media communication and the advanced science and technology, which bring with them spiritual noise to people, who, because of this, are disillusioned, painful, twisted and even freak in mind. These are our helplessness, because of the development of our social. While the development of human beings, we are also destructing ourselves. Thus people have more expectations for life and the survival became greater than before, but at the same time, we have to lament the fragility of life, and this also makes us feel helpless. On the road of pursuit development, we should pay more attention to the people's spiritual world, which has been influenced by the rapid development of industrial society.