White Noise Style

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise not only tells a story and has a message behind it, but he acts out the writing with a particular style. In the first part of the novel DeLillo focuses on the consumerism of the 1980’s he notes this by writing long off-topic tangents about different materialistic goods. The next focus on consumerism is how he shifts his writing throughout the first half. There is not really a plot and DeLillo is constantly switching up the scene so one minute the main character, Jack, is taking German lessons; the next minute he is having a conversation with his son while dropping him off at school. I think DeLillo deliberately writes in this fashion to represent how the human mind is constantly shifting the focus from one task to another without any bridge to connect the tasks. So he is taking a relatively hard theme to conceptually write about and is turning it into a style of writing. DeLillo emphasizes that the American people are consumers, receivers, receptors, and this theme flows into the next part of the novel labeled as “The Airborne Toxic Event.” In this part, there is a toxic mass that takes on a town, and while the town is evacuated all of the people are still susceptible to the hazardous mass, almost like sitting ducks. So, the consumers that had the world in their hands in the first part of the book, are now receiving the at full force the result of their own consumerism. Thirdly, DeLillo makes a point to put the children in the novel above the parents. He describes the children as in general more watchful, intelligent, and competent than their parents. At one point, Heimrich, Jack’s son, is talking to a crowd of people informing them on the airborne toxic event, what it is composed of, how it affects the body, and what they are doing to destroy it, before any of the adults. DeLillo also paints Heimrich in this superior lighting by having his conversations much more theological than the parents’ conversations. “Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems?” This quote is from Heimrich talking to his father on the topic of rain; a topic so simple that the conversation can be ended with the phrase “yes, it is raining” or “no it is not raining,” but DeLillo takes advantage of the opportunity to make the younger generation more intellectually awake than the older generation. This novel also stands out because DeLillo never addresses the title in any form. In other novels the author will drop in a sentence that contains the title, but DeLillo never does this. Instead he takes white noise and turns it into part of his writing style. In the first part, DeLillo is constantly listing all of the material things people own or bring to college, after a couple lines of this the readers feel extremely bored and in turn ends up tuning out the reading, they are reading the white noise. DeLillo also continues this theme in the last part of the novel as the main character Jack is about to kill a man and in the process Jack is talking to himself and reciting his plan over and over again until that too become white noise resulting in Jack straying from the perfectly thought out plan and in turn saving the man’s life that he put in danger. White Noise is a novel with a constant flow of ideas, thoughts, and themes, each in connection with one another. The novel stylistically stands out because it is so complex.