Narrative Technique in DeLillo’s White Noise

Narrative Technique in DeLillo’s White Noise

American literature has evolved extensively over the course of the history of the republic, from the Puritan sermons which emphasized the importance of a solid individual relationship between the individual self and the omnipotent God to the parody of relativism we find in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. One of the recurring concerns of American fiction, though by no means restricted to American writing, is the position of the self with regard to the other, whether manifest as God, nature, the community, or another individual. Since at least the Modernist period, writers have explored the definitions and relationships of the self formally as well as thematically and narratively. Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise carries on this particularly American obsession of the troublesome question of the self, its boundaries, its supremacy, and its very existence. Through his innovative use of his protagonist Jack Gladney as the novel’s narrator, DeLillo creates a fictional system which threatens to dissolve at every turn of the page. In offering a view of contemporary culture through the eyes of Jack Gladney, DeLillo creates a metafictional document that shifts the focus of the reader’s attention from mass culture to a single individual’s experience of that culture. Thus, the question is not so much the semblance of the fictional world of White Noise to the reader’s experience of reality, but the mimetic function of Jack Gladney’s narrative.

DeLillo’s narrative technique first appears in his first novel, Americana, published in 1971. In this novel, DeLillo discovers the power of moving "from first person consciousness to third person," of moving from the subject position to the object posi...

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