Don Delillo's White Noise
In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney is a middle aged college professor that constantly thinks of death. To protect his from this death fear, he consciously uses his job as a college professor and his middle class status to deny the reality of dying. Whenever he is not thinking of death, it is often because either his surroundings distract him or he is using his surroundings as a distraction. White noise, an unmentioned, yet understood phenomenon that occurs in the book through road signs, magazine articles, and TV commercials. It is the constant influx of information that detaches people from their surroundings. When describing a supermarket, DeLillo depicts white noise as a “human buzz” that finds its way into the background of human
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Since he knows that he cannot trust the information he is hearing, then who is to say he can trust the information he is seeing. When Murray and Jack were going to see the most photographed barn their view of the barn was corrupted by all the signs pointing to and the tourists viewing the barn. Murray points out that Jack cannot “see the barn… Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” (,). Murray means that once you see the signs, you are not seeing the barn for what it really is. The barn is now important because of the fact that people make it important. The barn itself is disassociated from the image of the barn, much like Baudrillard’s Simulacra. Baudrillard says that Jack sees the world around him, but now he is separated from it as if he were watching it on TV. He does not see it as a problem that he has become apathetic to the world. In the insane asylum fire, Jack and Heinrich are sitting in the car watching the building go up in flames. When a woman walks out in front of them burning alive they barely bat an eye. They see the event in front of them, yet they react as if they were seeing it on TV like one of the other catastrophes they watch. It separates him from the horrors of reality as if they were horrors on the
Since he knows that he cannot trust the information he is hearing, then who is to say he can trust the information he is seeing. When Murray and Jack were going to see the most photographed barn their view of the barn was corrupted by all the signs pointing to and the tourists viewing the barn. Murray points out that Jack cannot “see the barn… Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” (,). Murray means that once you see the signs, you are not seeing the barn for what it really is. The barn is now important because of the fact that people make it important. The barn itself is disassociated from the image of the barn, much like Baudrillard’s Simulacra. Baudrillard says that Jack sees the world around him, but now he is separated from it as if he were watching it on TV. He does not see it as a problem that he has become apathetic to the world. In the insane asylum fire, Jack and Heinrich are sitting in the car watching the building go up in flames. When a woman walks out in front of them burning alive they barely bat an eye. They see the event in front of them, yet they react as if they were seeing it on TV like one of the other catastrophes they watch. It separates him from the horrors of reality as if they were horrors on the