White Noise (1985) (edit title/settings)

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney: Narrator of the novel, and the chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. Jack lives in Blacksmith, a quiet college town, with his fourth wife, Babette, and four of their children from previous marriages. Jack often worries that he will be found lacking or incompetent, and as such he surrounds himself with things that make him look weighty and dignified by association. Jack, like every American, faces a continuous barrage of health and safety warnings from such sources as the news media and the packaging on the consumer goods he buys. Consequently, Jack is obsessed with the fear of his own death, a persistent dread that becomes magnified by his exposure to a toxic substance. Jack loves his wife, Babette, deeply, finding great comfort in her honesty and strength.
• Babette (Baba): Jack’s wife, and the mother of Wilder and Denise. Loving and caring, with a head of messy blond hair, Babette's sturdy and guileless character proves highly reassuring to Jack, particularly given the secretive, high-strung women he’s been married to in the past. Babette teaches adult education classes and reads to an elderly blind man named Old Man Treadwell. Like her husband, Babette has a deep-seated, acute fear of dying. She keeps this hidden from Jack and secretly begins participating in an experimental drug trial to alleviate her fear. As the treatment progresses, she has frequent memory lapses and becomes increasingly evasive.
• Denise: Babette’s eleven-year-old daughter with Bob Pardee. Denise is a sharp, often bossy girl and continually nags Babette about her health. She is the first person to notice her mother’s memory lapses, and she discovers Babette’s secret supply of Dylar.
• Heinrich: Jack’s awkward, analytical fourteen-year-old son with Janet Savory. Heinrich is dispassionate and skeptical and endlessly contradicts his father. Heinrich was born in the same year Jack founded the Hitler studies department, and he was given a German name in honor of that event.
• Steffie: Jack’s seven-year-old daughter with Dana Breedlove. Steffie is far more sensitive than the other children in her family and has trouble watching television shows where characters get hurt or humiliated.
• Wilder: Babette’s six-year-old son, and the youngest child in the family. Wilder never speaks in the novel, and periodically Jack worries about the boy’s slow linguistic development. Nevertheless, in his wordlessness, he remains an essential source of comfort for both Jack and Babette. More than any of the other children, Wilder seems genuinely open to the kind of “psychic data” Murray believes American children are privy to. Wilder has an older full brother, Eugene, though their father remains unnamed in the novel.
• Murray Jay Siskind: The Jew. An ex-sportswriter, a peculiar friend and colleague of Jack. His hair was tight and heavy looking. He had dense brows, wisps of hair curling up the sides of his neck. The small stiff beard, confined to his chin and accompanied by a mustache, seemed an optional component, to be stuck on or removed as circumstances warranted.
• Mr. Gray: Add a description of this character.
• Hitler
• Alfonse (Fast Food) Stompanato: A broad-chested glowering man whose collection of prewar soda pop bottles is on permanent display in an alcove.
• Vernon Dickey: Babette’s father. Vernon is a rough, good-natured man, seemingly unafraid of dying, who works with his hands and knows how to build things. His skill and ability make Jack feel incompetent and less masculine. Vernon drops by unexpectedly for a visit and gives Jack a loaded gun when he leaves.
• Lasher
• Old Man Treadwell: Elderly blind man, to whom Babette reads tabloids. One day, Old Man Treadwell and his sister, Gladys, go missing for several days. They are later discovered, lost and confused, in a shopping mall.
• Gladys Treadwell: Sister of Old Man Treadwell. She dies soon after she and her brother get lost in a shopping mall for several days.
• Tweedy Browner: One of Jack's ex-wives. Refers to Jack as 'Tuck'.
• Bee: Jack's daughter with Tweedy Browner.
• Malcolm Hunt: Tweedy Browner's husband. A diplomat who works undercover.
• Dylan
• Winnie Richards: Brilliant neuroscientist at the College-on-the-Hill. Winnie helps Jack learn about Dylar and Willie Mink. Jack discovers that she is almost always impossible to find, since she goes out of her way to be unnoticed.
• Dimitros Cotsakis: One of the New York professors at the College-on-the-Hill. Dimitros is a large man and former bodyguard. He is Murray’s principal competitor in Elvis studies, until he dies in a drowning accident.
• Stover

Quotes edit see section history

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• “The kitchen and the bedroom are the major chambers around here, the power haunts, the sources. She and I are alike in this, that we regard the rest of the house as storage space for furniture, toys, all the unused objects of earlier marriages and different sets of children, the gifts of lost in-laws, the hand-me-downs and rummages. Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight?”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “I was in situation with a woman in Detroit. She needed my semen in a divorce suit. The irony is that I love women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. The second irony is that it's not the bodies of women that I ultimately crave but their minds. The mind of a woman. The delicate chambering and massive unidirectional flow, like a physics experiment. What fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing stockings as she crosses her legs. That little staticky sound of rustling nylon can make me happy on several levels. The third and related irony is that it's the most complex and neurotic and difficult women that I'm invariably drawn to. I like simple men and complicated women.”

  Murray Jay Siskind

• “I'd ask you to visit my room, but it's too small for two people unless they're prepared to be intimate.”

  Murray Jay Siskind

• “Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.”

  At the beginning of Chapter 6, Jack considers his son’s premature hair loss and wonders if he or Heinrich’s mother might be responsible for their son’s thinning hair, by having unwittingly consumed toxic foods or raising the boy in the proximity of industrial waste.

• “Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.”

  Jack’s closing statement to his seminar at the end of Chapter 6 reverberates throughout the novel. The statement initially refers to the assassination attempt on Hitler, but it quickly takes on a larger significance once it becomes clear that death is Jack’s greatest fear.

• “We embraced, fell sideways to the bed in a controlled way, then repositioned ourselves, bathing in each other's flesh, trying to kick the sheets off our ankles. Her body had a number of long hollows, places the hand might stop to solve in the dark, tempo-slowing places.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “But I don't want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. 'I entered her.' 'He entered me.' We're not lobbies or elevators. 'I wanted him inside me,' as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don't care what these people do as long as they don't enter or get entered.”

  Babette (Baba)

• “The German tongue. Fleshy, warped, spit-spraying, purplish and cruel. One eventually had to confront it. Wasn't Hitler's own struggle to express himself in German the crucial subtext of his massive ranting autobiography, dictated in a fortress prison in the Bavarian hills? Grammar and syntax. The man may have felt himself imprisoned in more ways than one.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “When he switched from English to German, it was as though a cord had been twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice, a scrape and gargle that sounded like stirring of some beast's ambition. He gaped at me and gestured, he croaked, he verged on strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth of Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it.”

  Murray Jay Siskind

• “To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come.”

  Murray Jay Siskind

• “Who will die first? She says she want to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without me, especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precede me. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it's obvious she thinks we have a choice in the matter. She also thinks nothing can happen to us as long as there are dependent children in the house. The kids are a guarantee of our relative longevity. We're safe as long as they're around. But once they get big and scatter, she wants to be the first to go. She sounds almost eager. She is afraid I will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in the night. It isn't that she doesn't cherish life; it's being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “The sound came from our own red brick firehouse, sirens that hadn't been tested in a decade or more. They made a noise like some territorial squawk from out of the Mesozoic. A parrot carnivore with a DC-9 wingspan. What a raucousness of brute aggression filled the house, making it seem as though the walls would fly apart. So close to us, so surely upon us. Amazing to think this sonic monster lay hidden nearby for years.”

  Jack Gladney

• “Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.'”

  Murray Jay Siskind

• “German shepherds still patrolled the town, accompanied by men in Mylex suits. We welcomed the dogs, got used to them, fed and petted them, but did not adjust well to the sight of costumed men with padded boots, hoses attached to their masks. We associated those outfits with the source of our trouble and fear.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “There was no large city with a vaster torment we might use to see our own dilemma in some soothing perspective. No large city to blame for our sense of victimization. No city to hate and fear. No panting megacenter to absorb our woe, to distract us from our unremitting sense of time—time as the agent of our particular ruin, our chromosome breaks, hysterically multiplying tissue.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney—signs of deep-reaching isolation

• “What if death is nothing but sound?”

• “Electrical noise.”

• “You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”

• “Uniform, white.”

  Babette and Jack’s conversation about the substance of death in the middle of Chapter 26 is the first and only time that white noise becomes specifically equated with death.

• “Look past the violence.”

• “Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

  Jack and Murray's conversation at the end of Chapter 28.

• “Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It’s enough to say that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event.”

  In Chapter 30, Jack chases Winnie Richards to the top of a hill where they both pause to stare at one of the magnificent sunsets looming on the horizon.

• “Routine things can be deadly, Vern, carried to extremes. I have a friend who says that's why people take vacations. Not to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.”

  Jack (J. A. K.) Gladney

• “What people in exodus fear most immediately is that those in positions of authority will long since have fled, leaving us in charge of our own chaos.”

  Jack Gladney

• “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”

  Jack Gladney

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• The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.

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• What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

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• Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

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• “Because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.”

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• What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”

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• “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

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• “I don’t know what your personal involvement is with this substance,” she said, “but I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.”

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• “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.”

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• It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.

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• The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream. May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Iron City
• New York
• Glassboro
• Montana
• California

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Dylar: a fictional drug, an experimental treatment for the fear of death

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• The Pervasiveness of Technology: In White Noise, the pervasive presence of technology proves both menacing and comforting. Throughout the novel, in counterpoint to the human babble of Jack’s friends, family, and neighbors, modern technology asserts itself through the humming of machines and the constant stream of media sounds and images. Technology has become as much a part of the texture of daily of life as humans are themselves. In fact, the two seem inextricable, as DeLillo’s narrative weaves seamlessly between human and mechanical voices. Faceless and beyond the grasp of the individual, technology makes everyone anonymous. Sometimes, this distance and objectivity seems comforting, as when the ATM confirms Jack’s own financial calculations, and Jack becomes filled with a sense of peace. At other times, this detachment proves threatening, as when the SIMUVAC technician, after punching Jack’s details into a computer, manages to learn something of incredible significance about Jack yet cannot (or will not) give Jack any concrete information. The airborne toxic event, a dense, threatening cloud of dangerous chemicals, provides a particularly frightening image of technology gone terribly, fatally awry. Yet even this seemingly overt symbol of technology’s capacity for destruction proves more complex than it first appears, as the airborne toxic event paradoxically causes the most beautiful sunsets the region has ever seen. The chemical cloud is noxious and lethal, but it also creates beauty. When Steffie mumbles “Toyota Celica” in her sleep, a similar tension is being evoked, as a crass marketing term becomes transformed, in Jack’s eyes, into something mystical and beautiful. The phrase, which seems to represent cold, mechanized modernity, ends up expressing something primal and deeply human.
• The Fear of Death: The fear of death lies at the center of White Noise. As Babette notes when she confesses her fear to Jack, “What is more underlying than death?” Everything in the novel—from Hitler to the supermarket, from the airborne toxic event to the white noise of the novel’s title—circles back to human beings’ primal, deep-seated fear of dying. DeLillo’s novel details how modern life attempts to push this fear out of sight, and yet, as in the character of Jack Gladney, the fear continues to resurface and fill us with dread. Different characters in the novel approach death in different, often contradictory ways. Jack approaches it with terror. Heinrich faces death dispassionately and analytically. Murray sees death all around him and remains continually fascinated and engaged by it. Winnie Richards notes that death adds texture to life, while Jack and Babette would give anything to avoid it. Jack and Babette speculate that death might be nothing more than an eternal hum of white noise: detached bits of data, garbled gibberish, and meaningless sounds, all vibrating at an equal frequency so that nothing in particular stands out and everything remains potentially significant. However, this description could also apply to Jack’s life and toWhite Noise in general. While there is a general plotline in the novel, the bulk of the book is comprised of digressions, tangential conversations, and snippets of overheard machines and broadcasts. Though DeLillo avoids drawing any distinct conclusions himself, preferring to leave the novel in an open state, this close relationship between life, death, and white noise might mean that death lingers menacingly in the background of our lives, or it might mean that death, as an inextricable part of life, represents something we shouldn’t be afraid of. Both attitudes seem supported by the novel, which presents white noise—and the stronger, yet more elusive strain of sound that people like Murray and Jack detect behind that white noise—as simultaneously a thing of dread and of intangible transcendence.
• The Tension Between Reality and Artifice: Throughout White Noise, the authentic and the artificial often blur together, and substance seems interchangeable with surface. This confusion between appearance and reality represents an essential part of Jack’s own existence. Although Jack has created a venerable, professorial persona for himself, he remains painfully aware of the total fabrication of this character. Aided by the distinguished outfits and the weighty-sounding professional name, Jack manages to hide the fact that he lacks the ability to speak German, a seemingly basic skill for the field of Hitler studies. Jack is driven to learn the language only when an academic conference threatens to expose his lie—not in order to study his subject more deeply. Jack, in turn, is only invested in Hitler as a surface entity and seems more preoccupied with the cultural myths surrounding Hitler than in the historical facts about the man. Jack relies on Hitler’s larger, more powerful persona to bolster his own fragile sense of self-worth and self-identity, capitalizing on Hitler’s surface to build up his own.Jack feels inadequate because, in his mind, artifice is inherently inferior to reality. However, other moments in the novel contradict this position. When Murray and Jack visit the Most Photographed Barn in America, for example, Murray argues that the barn itself isn’t intrinsically significant. Rather, the fact that countless tourists have come to visit the location gives the site meaning and value. Each time a tourist comes to admire this essentially empty and meaningless structure, he or she adds to the psychic energy surrounding the barn. The barn becomes relevant because many people have invested in the image of the barn. In Murray’s opinion, no genuine difference between surface and substance exists.At the same time, DeLillo satirizes postmodern human beings’ inability to discern the genuine from the fabricated. The SIMUVAC, or Simulated Evacuation, is perhaps the most extreme example of the tension between what is real and what is artificial. For SIMUVAC, real events, such as the airborne toxic event—which was itself caused by a derivative of an original chemical—are used to prepare for later simulations, and later simulations are used to prepare for other simulations. In this environment, where technology allows for endless duplication, it becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain where reality ends and replication begins.
• The Question “Who Will Die First?”: The question “Who will die first?” frequently recurs in Jack and Babette’s conversations and provides an insight into their relationship to each other and to death. The question enters both the narrative and their conversations abruptly, and it further puts the idea of death into the story. Jack and Babette don’t just ask the question—they debate it, comparing their potential grief and misery. Each claims to want to die first, because the burden of living without the other would be more than either of them could bear. The irony, however, is that each is so terrified of death that they can hardly bear to live.
• Plots: Early in the novel, Jack states that all plots tend toward death. Jack repeats this simple statement several times throughout the novel, and it serves as a structural guide for the narrative. Since Jack is afraid of death, it seems logical that he would avoid plots, and indeed the story he narrates seems to meander, without any commitment to a straightforward, propulsive plot. However, once Jack becomes exposed to Nyodene D.—and, therefore, aware of his own inevitable mortality—the story begins to gain momentum and starts to resemble a conventional plot. Suspense, mystery, infidelity, and a gun rapidly enter the narrative. DeLillo’s plot becomes so deliberately structured that it almost seems like a satire of narrative plots. Jack’s initial statement turns out to be true—plots do tend toward death. In that regard, the book’s structure was evident from the start.
• Hitler: Jack’s interest in Hitler as a historical figure relates only tangentially to the historical man, Adolf Hitler, and the genocide and war he instigated. Hitler’s importance to Jack rests almost exclusively in the sheer size and stature of Hitler’s persona. As perhaps the most hated and feared figure of the twentieth century, Hitler has spawned a myth larger than life and, as Murray notes, larger than death. The name Hitler invokes the Holocaust and the massive destruction caused by World War II, rendering Hitler the man a symbol for death and devastation. Though Jack remains fixated on the fear of his own death, he realizes that the wide-scale extermination caused by Hitler dwarfs his individual death. By wrapping himself in Hitler’s image and subsuming himself in Hitler’s persona, Jack hopes that he too can become greater than death and stave off his insignificant fear.
• The Airborne Toxic Event: The airborne toxic event, caused by a train derailment, embodies the artificial, technology-induced danger that is characteristic of the modern world. The substance behind the event, Nyodene D., is a derivation of an original chemical, suggesting the terrible potential of mechanical replication. The symptoms and potentially lethal effects of the airborne toxic event are never certain or clear, and in that regard they are part of the “daily falsehearted death” of technology that Jack notes. Jack describes the toxic cloud in mythological terms, giving the event historical proportions. Previous eras had death ships, as Jack notes, while the modern era has a dark, billowing cloud full of man-made toxins. This is our new symbol and the new face of dread, the modern death ship with its unknown and unintended consequences threatening the edges of our lives.
• Sunsets: The spectacular sunsets of White Noise, beautiful in the beginning and almost overwhelmingly brilliant by the end, simultaneously suggest mystery, dread, and awe. DeLillo never elucidates whether they are the products of toxins in the environment or part of some other unnatural, or potentially natural, phenomenon. Indeed, part of their power lies in their mystery, and part of it lies in the quiet sense of fear they invoke. They are beauty and dread wrapped into one, and through the combination of the two, they become sublime. These visionary landscapes seem to perfectly mirror the fusion of life and death that lies at the heart of existence, as depicted in White Noise.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Old Masters, and followed by Queer.

Preceded by Another Roadside Attraction, and followed by Ulysses.

Preceded by The Alexandria Quartet, and followed by Brideshead Revisited.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Don DeLillo (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Michael Prichard (Narrator)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• National Book Award (1985: Fiction)
• National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist, 1985: Fiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Contains violence, sexual references and descriptions, and complicated and confusing content.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( D ) › DeLillo, Don
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics