White Noise: Consumerism or Death

Year 2001, Issue: 13, 73 - 78, 01.04.2001

Haidar Eid

Abstract

In this article, I attempt to replace Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise 1985 in the context of a late-capitalist post modern world by discussing its existential understanding of the concept of death. I will, therefore, treat the concept of death as a dominant motif and a metaphor for the alienation of the post modern subject in a simulacral world. White Noise is the story of Jack Gladney, the chairperson of the Hitler Studies Department, at a college in the America of the eighties, who has a constant fear of death. He, his fourth wife, Babette, and their children from previous marriages live a typical American life. Death controls everything he does, and he therefore tries to get rid of his fear of death by occupying himself with very American habits, i.e. shopping, watching TV, reading tabloid magazines, and by debating scientific issues and academic interpretations of culture with his Baudrillardean postmodernist colleague, Murray Siskind.

References

• DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Picador, 1985.
• Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel. E Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.