Death and Dying in Delillo’s White Noise

789 Words4 Pages
Among other things, Don DeLillo seems completely preoccupied with death and the arduous task of living with the knowledge of death in his novel White Noise. Acceptance of our finite, fragile existence over time is certainly not a phenomenon unique to a single civilization or historical era. Rather than discuss the inescapable mortality that connects all humankind with broad, generalized strokes, DeLillo is concerned with the particular (peculiar?) late Twentieth Century cultural and psychological mechanisms that attempt to define, recast, or obscure the relationship between the self and death. Technology, he asserts, has fostered a material culture of consummation, of insatiable appetites which simultaneously confirms and allows us to temporarily escape knowledge of our mortality. "We've agreed to be part of a collective perception...To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break of from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone" (12,73). Whether the dominant system is desirable or reprehensible, there seems to be an almost primal need for a structure of some sort. The very human impulse to order, "to break things down,...to separate and classify" as Babette puts it, is an integral part of establishing an identity (192). Jack Gladney is, thus, ironically a critic and a victim of this very dilemma. Technology distances Jack from death as well as life. The scientific method upon which technology is based begin with a fundamental assumption of objectivity. Observation at a distance is necessary to form legitimate conclusions, to construct knowledge of an "invisible... impressive... disquieting" truth (46). Jack's mind is attuned, sensitized, to detect "codes, countercodes, social histories...hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material" on an academic, theoretical, level. But as Jack states, "When your death is rendered
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