Don Delillo's White Noise

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In the midst of many themes, one of the things Don DeLillo seems completely preoccupied with is the constant reminder of death in his novel "White Noise". The inability to accept one's finite existence in a vast, incomprehensible universe is unquestionably an experience familiar to countless individuals. However, rather than discussing in broad strokes the inescapable mortality that ties together all of mankind, in a passage describing an exchange between Jack Gladney and a SIMUVAC technician, DeLillo criticizes the technology-filled world of the late twentieth century defined by reliance on masses of humming machines and faith in the incessant stream of media sounds and images. Technology, he avows, has fostered a material culture of consumption …show more content…

The scientific method upon which technology is based is defined as a method of observation or procedure based on scientific ideas or methods and as an empirical method that has underlain the development of natural science since the 17th century. It is now commonly represented as ideally compromising some or all of systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation, induction and the formulation of hypotheses, the making of deductions from the hypotheses, the experimental testing of the deductions, and if necessary, the modification of the hypotheses ("scientific method"). Naturally then, technology is designed upon a fundamental assumption of objectivity: observation at a distance in order to form legitimate conclusions, to construct knowledge of an "invisible... impressive... disquieting" truth (46). Jack's mind is accustomed to detect "codes, countercodes, social histories...hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material" (37) on a theoretical level. But as Jack states, "When your death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak,..you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself" (141). Death, when it becomes an imminent part of Jack's awareness, ceases to be a "professional matter" (74). Doctors become modern high priests, the only member of society capable of decoding the "network of symbols, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods" (141). Death in Jack's mind starts to take on a body of its own, or as Jack discloses, he becomes "a stranger in [his] own dying" (141). Progressively, Jack is starting to feel like death is something observable and quantifiable, a whole organism distinct from himself. This belief pulls Jack further from reality because death is not

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