Individuality (a need to be self)(long blog)

One of the interesting themes I found while reading white noise was individuality and identity. We can see this with any character really because those ideas are what make up any person. I wanted to analyze Jack in with this theme. Part of jack’s struggle throughout the novel is the fact that he does know himself. He spends his academic life building up a persona so that his colleagues believe that he is this significant academic figure. This can be seen by him spending his life studying, from a point of view, a useless study. He spends all this time studying in Hitler Studies and he doesn’t even speak the language. A conflict he faces is that he doesn’t feel like a real scholar, he feels like a phony. I think he realizes that he reached a point where he had this personality that wasn’t him. This got me thinking of the wider idea of individuality. Part of the novel is telling us that as we modernize, we lose our individuality. In my opinion, individuality is what identifies everyone but it doesn’t make you unique. A person’s individuality comes from their personality and their experiences. Everyone has their own experiences which shape their personality. As our world becomes more connected and more consumer based, we are encouraged by society and media to live a certain way, to change our personalities. This causes people to change their behaviors and make choices to feel more included. These actions alone don’t change someone entire character but because we are shaped by our experiences and choices, over time each choice someone changes someone. If someone follows this path, at what point do we stop being ourselves. This is what is happening to Jack, he started down this path for that individuality, but as time went on, he is living more for others and for their approval than living for himself and what he wants. With Jack, he builds this image that he is this intelligent professor in a seemingly useless subject so that others will respect or admire him. But the fact that he doesn’t even know German shows that this whole persona is a front that he has built for himself. He feels like a fake in his professional community. He’s lost his sense of individuality and self through this process and it begs the question if he really knows himself. Essentially, I believe that people try to walk a thin line with their individuality. People want to be included to they make themselves similar to others so that they are accepted, while at the same time, people want to distinguish themselves so that they feel like their own person. With Jack, I feel he falls to hard into the category of trying to appease others and he loses himself. This can also be related to what is going on right now with the corona virus pandemic. With everyone in the world experiencing the same thing, people are looking for ways to distinguish themselves from others. Everyone right now is all going through this quarantine life and I think that part of the motivation for people to try new things is because they feel what to feel unique. Or when they talk about the stay at home being different all across the country, it’s a want for people to feel unique and different from others when in reality the quarantine is going to be very similar if not the same all across the country. So people are trying new things and getting new skills as a drive to feel more unique compared to others.