White Noise

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.

There are plenty of commerce techniques, which lead customers to make a certain selection, to convince them to buy a product. Sometimes those techniques are so forceful that may radically change our opinion. One of the very first scenes shows us a picture of the family eating lunch. DeLillo focuses our attention on how packaged is the food on the table: “open cartons, crumpled tinfoil, shiny bags of potato chips, bowls of past substances covered with plastic wrap, flip-top rings and twist ties”(7). There are a lot of things, but I would say: lack of food. From Babette, current Jack’s wife, who prepared the meal, we hear, that the matter of fact, she wanted them to eat something totally different. Farther she is critiqued by her teenager daughters: Denise and Steffie for her bad taste: ”She keeps buying that [food]. But she never eats it” (7). How is it, that Babette, who picks the food, makes so horrific purchases? She is the brightest example of someone, who stopped to think independently, and got attracted to shiny packa...

... middle of paper ...

...ldings with zillion products we can select from. There must be a place where we can get the goods, it is fantastic that we also can relax, listen music, meet a friend, and enjoy ourselves there. However we, the clients must be aware of the fact, that those places are gigantic, war arenas where our minds are under siege, where our brains may be attacked by subconscious contents, that those palaces are really full of hidden suggestion traps. This is the full package. Don DeLillo in his novel states, that we easily become victims of massive number of commercials, and salesmen, whose job is to guide us “to endless well-being” (83). From the well-trained specialist we hear: what we want to wear, eat, listen, read, and this is the time when we truthfully die. We die as a separate, unique, valuable unit, in order to become subscriber to the “noises from the tiers” (84).