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In Don Delilo’s, White Noise different themes are displayed throughout the novel. Some themes are the fear of death, loss of identity, technology as the enemy, and American consumerism. The society represented in the novel views people as objects and emotionally detached from many things. Death is always in the air and trapped in peoples mind. The culture that’s represented in the novel adds to the loss of individualism, but also adds to the figurative death of the characters introduced in the novel.
What is white noise? The definition is a noise containing many frequencies. White noise is connected with technology, which is one of the themes in the novel as well. It consist of the background noises that follows throughout the narrative. Although it’s not the same humming every time it is still a constant noise in the novel. The main characters speculate that maybe death is just an annoying, endless stream of white noise. Just as death is an everyday conversation, white noise just becomes as frequent. Being associated with death, but also with life.
Jack Gladney, the main character in the book teachers Hitler studies. His hidden fear of death grows gradually throughout the book. The fascination with death and his studies causes the start his lost individuality. He spends so much time talking and educating people about Hitler, but he still feels the need to hide behind a black robe and thick glasses to be taken more seriously. When he is out of his element he is insecure and isn’t sure who he is as a person without his studies.
“Only Hitler is large enough and terrible enough to absorb and neutralize Jack Gladney's obsessive fear of dying.”(Phillips 1) Jack realizes that the wide-scale genocide created and ran by Hitler makes ...
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...and Babette have to hide behind costumes just to be able to live a life that is surrounded by death. Society lives on technology now, the costumes that people live in today are behind computer screens and through social media profiling. Losing individuality and identity is the day death becomes reality.
Work Cited
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DeLilo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin.1985. Print.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. N.p.: n.p., 1949. Print.
Phillips, Jayne A. "Crowding Out Death." New York Times 13 Jan. 1985: n. pag. Web. Web. 10 May 2014.
Smith. "White Noise by Don Delillo." : Hitler. N.p., 13 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 May 2014.
"White Noise Themes." Grade Saver. N.p., n.d. Web.
"White Noise: Themes, Motifs & Symbols." SparkNotes. SparkNotes, n.d. Web. 11 May 2014.
The Silber Medal winning biography, “Surviving Hitler," written by Andrea Warren paints picture of life for teenagers during the Holocaust, mainly by telling the story of Jack Mandelbaum. Avoiding the use of historical analysis, Warren, along with Mandelbaum’s experiences, explains how Jack, along with a few other Jewish and non-Jewish people survived.
Maier, Wendy A. "Adolf Hitler." In World at War: Understanding Conflict and Society. ABC-CLIO, 2005. Accessed February 4, 2014. http://worldatwar.abc-clio.com/.
White Noise by Don Delillo uses the unusual story of Jack Gladney and his family to illustrate the postmodern ideas of death. The influence of death's presence on the character's mentality, consumerist behavior and everyday life, manipulates the thought process and actions that the characters display. Those which are most conscious of death such as Jack Gladney and Babette are more connected to and consumed by it. They are both so controlled by the fear of death that their normal thought process is altered by it. Throughout the novel Jack and Babette experience and react to the fear of death in different ways, which affects their perspective on everything surrounding them. This shows how a universal thing such as death causes a reaction that
The Holocaust is marked as one of the most horrifying events of the 20th century.The person who was responsible for the Holocaust was Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party. The question is, how, and why was Hitler able to do this? The actual truth behind all this is that, Hitler could make the world his, just by using words. In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, it tells a story about a young girl growing up when Nazi Germany was invincible. The author explores some very meaningful, yet, controversial themes for the most part of the novel. Out of all themes, he believes that words hold a remarkable power. He explores how words manipulate, divide, and connect people.
Mckale,Donald M.. Hitler’s Shadow War, the Holocaust and World War 2. New York: Cooper Square.2002.Print.
White Noise is a novel written by Don DeLillo in 1985. This novel is based around the life of the main character, Jack Gladney and his family. At the beginning of the novel, Jack’s life is very dull and at a standpoint until one day due to an accident, a toxic gas has been released into the air. This situation changes the way his family lives and thinks and several secrets are revealed. Throughout the book, Jack faces many conflicts with himself that contribute to the way he thinks and reacts to things around him. Jack, who is also the narrator, occasionally finds deep meaning in random happenings and objects in order to understand his world better. This is caused by the obsessive age with social media, which he finds meaningless and tries
By coding his novel, White Noise, as if it were a television show, DeLillo comments on the state of affairs in our modern culture. DeLillo demonstrates our society's codependency on what was originally only intended to be a medium of communication. By showing the benevolence of the medium as it translates into the lives of his characters, DeLillo is saying that maybe our dependence on television, even as blood bath entertainment is not as bad as generally perceived.
Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth [growing up in Hitler's Shadow]. New York: Random House/Listening Library, 2006. Print.
Don Dellilo's protagonist in his novel "White Noise," Jack Gladney, has a "nuclear family" that is, ostensibly, 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. It's basically the antipodal image of the 1950's "nuclear family." Despite this surface-level disjointedness, it is his family and the "extrasensory rapport" that he shares with them allows Jack to survive in his world. Murray, Jack's friend, argues that "The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted" (82). Heinrich, Jack's son, explicates this notion in his constant "doubting" of reality, arguing, for example, that it's "all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex" (45). Jack is caught in a perpetual tension between experiencing reality and relationships with his family as "actual" while simultaneously being told that there is no "actual," that man is nothing more than "the sum total of" his "data" (141). It is only through a recounting of the past, the sensual experience of objects and the transcendent nature of his relationship with is children that Jack is able to affirm the actuality of the "actual," to affirm, for example, that love is more than merely a biological chemical.
Human nature can be essentially good or bad. World War II, an international disaster, created conflicting ideas about humanity. German Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, was the source of tragedy for many Jews and other innocent lives during this time. The infamous Hitler was the leader of one of the world’s most horrific genocide, the Holocaust. Through Holocaust, many “criminals” were imprisoned, tortured, and killed from concentration camps, death camps, and murder. These “criminals” were mostly Jews, Polish, gypsies, disabled, and other minorities. The novel, In My Hands, by Irene Gut Opdyke and Jennifer Armstrong, voices Opdyke’s story during World War II. Irene’s experiences of protecting Jews show both sides of human nature, good and bad.
In Don DeLillo’s eighth novel: White Noise, warmly accepted by critiques, the author exposes, that the money gained colossal meaning during our time, plunging down other values like freedom of customer choice and respect for shoppers. In his work of fiction he illustrates how current world of commerce impacts our minds by manipulating our decisions, and also he indicates that a human nature demonstrates immense vulnerability for such attack. Moreover the ubiquitous commercials lead us to desire of having things we never tried before, to see things not worth seeing, to buy stuff we really do not need. The novelist tries to open our eyes to identify and understand how works this commercial destructive mechanism.
Mass Media. Ed. William Dudley. Farmington Hills, MI: Thompson Gale, 2005. 121-130.
Croteau, D., Hoynes, W., & Milan, S. (2012). Media/society (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
The mass media has played a key role in shaping people’s lives. The modern society’s use of mass media including TV, radio, newspaper, as well as print media has largely influenced people’s ideas regarding themselves and the society at large. This is evident from their behavior towards themselves and their community as well as their treatment of the environment. While some experts believe that the media is to blame for most of the negative behavioral traits among the active members of society, the majority agree that the media makes people understand and develop a positive sense of association with their society within which they live, making it easy for them to identify and get their role in it.
Redlich, Fredrick C. Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.