An Analysis On Postmodernist Features Of White Noise

White Noise was published in January 1985, winning the American Book Award for 1985. The author, Don DeLillo, was born in New York City in a small Italian neighborhood in the Bronx. White Noise is probably Don DeLillo's most popular novel, largely because most readers see it as DeLillo's warmest and most human book. In this story, the ideas that seem to captivate DeLillo are fleshed out in real life in a way that none of his other books quite achieves.White Noise has often been named Don DeLillo's "breakout book". It is not difficult to understand why it became one of the most widely acclaimed fictional works of the 1980s: its mordantly witty anatomy of the post-nuclear family; its sly satire of television, advertising, and academia; its letter-perfect portrayal of the sounds and sights of supermarkets, malls, and tabloids all strike chords that echo strongly with contemporary Americans.This thesis mainly discusses the five features of White Noise from the point view of postmodernism.Chapter one probes the theoretical background of White Noise and gives an illustration of it. For DeLillo's characters, contemporary American "reality" has become completely mediated and artificial; theirs is a culture of comprehensive and seemingly total representation.Chapter two mainly deals with the role of television in the Americans' life. Nowadays people are assailed by a million messages. Television, newspapers, signs, sounded words and those messages whose import we cannot understand—electromagnetic impulses—that pass through our body, radiated from thousands of channels. Words assail us, icons confound us. They sink into our bodies, become part of us, and perhaps, reemerge in dreams.Chapter three analyzes the fear of death which haunts the characters of White Noise. Jack Gladney, the hero of White Noise, is obsessed with the fear of death. He looks at family photos and wonders who will die first. The TV offers a solution, by turning people into nonparticipating spectators of destruction. On television, we watch the most spectacular and apocalyptic enactments of death without being personally affected by them. DeLillo's characters comfortably watch floods, mud slides and emptying volcanoes. The disaster made them only wish for more and more. Death and destruction in their cinematic pretenses become objects of desire. DeLillo's characters are fully invested in this cinematic play with destruction and death, but nothing can allay the persistent fear of real dying. Gladney and his wife Babette are terrified by the prospect of dying, hoping to master the fear by consuming a miracle drug Dylar, which turns out to be a deception.Chapter four is about the forces of the supermarket. In American capitalism the forces of the marketplace are paramount and concepts of private ownership, property, and the drive towards profit are integral to social organization. The supermarket is a powerful synecdoche for postmodern society. In it man encounters only that which he constructs or produces. So powerful is the illusion of omnipotence that he comes to understand himself as that which is constituted by those products. They provide the fullness of being.Chapter five explores the post-nuclear family in America. Jack Gladney, has a "nuclear family" that is, superficially, a prime example of the disjointed nature way of the family of the 80's and 90's—what with Jack's multiple past marriages and the fact that his children aren't all related.