A major theme in White Noise is the idea of death, or rather, the fear of it. Throughout the novel, the idea of fearing death is talked about a lot and by several different characters who all present different ways to approach death. If we look at it from a primal perspective, fearing death is what motivates people to live. For a species to succeed, they need to be aware of their own mortality so that they don’t die and they can reproduce. So, the idea of fearing death is a very natural instinct so that people don’t die. Now this can be taken to extremes as shown in the novel. It is important to note that the idea of death is extremely present in the novel partially because of the air born toxic gas. Many of the fears and conversations of death arise from this toxic, which lingers the world. In terms of individuals fears, for one, Jack and Babette both extremely fear death and would do anything to avoid it. Jack for one, fears death to the extreme. He is constantly frightened by it and constantly worried about it to the point where he overthinks simple things like a digital clock: “Sweat trickled down my ribs. The digital reading on the clock-radio was 3:51. Always odd numbers at times like this. What does it mean? Is death odd-numbered?”. We see here that his fear of death is so extreme that he sees omen in a digital clock. Babette also feels this way as shown when she tells him: “‘I’m afraid to die,’ she said. ‘I think about it all the time. It won’t go away’”. Babette and jack both show this irrational fear of death that they think about all the time a see everywhere. This makes them extremely cautious and it really controls their lives. One of the reasons that death is a constant fear for them is the air born toxic event. For them it is a constant reminder that they are mortal and could easily die, and its fear inducing. This can be related to our own lives with the COVID-19 pandemic. We know more about the disease now so for some it’s not as scary but in the early days of the pandemic, there was little information about this new virus and there was a lot of false information circulating the media. In these early days, a lot of fear of death spread because people didn’t want to get sick and die. I think that this caused people to be much more cautious with how they interacted with others and how they took care of their health. I also believe this pandemic will have lasting societal impacts on the fear of death, or more specifically the fear of getting sick. Things like masks, hand sanitizer will definitely be more widely used. Also, practices such as regular personal hygiene and social distancing will be more regularly practiced. This is all because people don’t want to get sick and they don’t want to die. Although we have already seen this lighten up as more information has spread about the virus, people are become less concerned with their fear of death and attempting to return to normalcy. This could also be because people don’t want to be controlled by a fear of death. They would rather live their lives to the fullest and not be concerned with death. If we as a society focused too much on our fear of death, we would become like the characters in the novel, seeing death everywhere, looking for a way to distract us from death, or looking for a way to control death.
Categories
Great American Novels 