On The Postmodern Consumerism And Its Whiteness In White Noise

Don DeLillo, who has published 13 novels, several plays and numerous short stories till now, is an American postmodern writer. He won the National Book Award in 1985 for his eighth novel White Noise, which established him alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the most important and the most influential contemporary writers. In this novel, DeLillo portrays the postindustrial consumer society in twentieth century for us. This paper discusses the postmodern consumerism and its whiteness embodied in White Noise .The paper falls into three parts with an introduction and a conclusion included. The introduction gives a brief summary of Don Delillo and White Noise.The first part is an introduction to postmodernism and consumerism.The second part is about the specific American consumerism in the novel. There are many kinds of expressions in the postmodern consumer society, but in White Noise, supermarkets and malls are the most obvious phenomenon . And shopping is just like 'religious rites' for the Gladneys in the consumer society. People crazily swarm into the supermarket to go shopping in order to overcome their fear of death, drive their loneliness away, gain safety and security. Even intellectuals, ideas, and art are manufactured in White Noise. In Gladney's world, Hitler appears to be just another subject of academic discourse, arousing no special passion. He uses Hitler, the architect of the Holocaust, the most horrifying mass-murderer in history, as his academic research to establish his fame.Part Three is about the whiteness embodied throughout the novel. White Noise highlights death and the obsessive fear of death, a very common but rarely discussed phobia. This part discusses the frequently-discussed topic, death, between the couple—Jack Gladney and Babette. Therefore, white noise is a representation of death. We are always aware of death but do not wish to acknowledge it due to fear. In this sense death can be seen as the white noise, which is always present in our life but not always heard. Another two obvious things related with the whiteness are the violence and mass media in the postindustrial world. TV is a 'primal force in the American family.' Violence is frequently showed on TV and the post-human are accustomed to it. It has permeates the minds of them so deeply that they even simulate violence in reality. These are total postmodern whiteness in a consumer society.Consumer society offers us convenience and prosperity, whereas it makes people feel lonely, helpless, frustrated and anxious at the same time. People lose their subjectivity as a result of receiving information on mass media passively. Therefore they are addicted to violence and they fear death. If death is just a voice, then it must be "uniform, white". DeLillo criticizes and satirizes the darkness and the whiteness of consumerism in a postmodern world through White Noise.