Author: Jack Bruer

A fundamental theme of White Noise is a fear of death and one’s own mortality. It follows the main character’s attempt to overcome his own fear of his death through the control of others mortality. I argue that instead of fearing one’s mortality, one should instead embrace. As a wise turtle once said “one often meets their fate on the path they take to avoid it”. Fear of death is entirely healthy, as the human brain evolved to fear uncertainty’s, and death is the ultimate uncertainty, as you can never truly know what happens after. You can hold religious beliefs, you can embrace nihilism, you can become a slave to consumption as demoed by White Noise, but at the end of the day, no one knows what truly comes after, and this is intrinsically terrifying. To deal with this uncertainty, and our inability to function in the face, we’ve invented a whole host of coping mechanisms, such as religion, and White Noise serves as a critique of these and human nature in general, by showing that whatever action you take, whoever you kill, you cannot escape your own mortality.

One of the core motifs in White Noise is that many of the people within the book array their lives around consumerism and the consumption of goods and services. This focus on life begins to change for main character jack after his brush with death, and he begins to realize that the consumption and academia he’s based his life around is truly quite shallow and meaningless. I think the book’s emphasis on consumerism is a critique of how life in the 80’s, when this book was published, was moving away from more traditional religious values and towards more free, consumerist ideas. I think this shift in what gives one’s life meaning has been occurring and is occurring in the modern age, but instead of consumerism, humanity’s focus has shifted to politics. Part of being human is the human experience, and the human experience is inherently tribal in nature. Humans evolved to need to be a part of an in group, as this was critical to survival for much of human history, and part of being within an in group is having an out group you’re arrayed against. Throughout human history these needs were filled through living within towns, communities, and nations, and waging warfare against other, outside groups. One of the last bastions of these instincts to be a part of something bigger than oneself was religion, and as society has become increasingly secular, so too has participation in and dedication to religion decreased. In its place humans, by their very nature, required a new in group to ally themselves with and a new out group to work against. The answer, for many, has been politics, and I think that is why our society in the modern day has become so incredibly polarized. Political thought has ceased being just that, thought, and has instead morphed into a kind of religion in its own right, with its own forms of heresy, devotion, and even worship of central political figures. Political ideas have morphed from someone’s beliefs into a dogma, that isn’t to be questioned and enforced on those who attempt to subvert or change its tenets. Political debate has morphed from the discourse it once was into a battleground quite similar to the centuries long conflict between Christians and Muslims over control of Europe. Because of this, changing someone’s political beliefs has become akin to attempting to convert them to your religion, to change their underlying way of thinking to more closely match yours. This attempted conversion is not met well by most, and one’s natural response is to block of the person trying to change you by dehumanizing them, so instead of having to fight and against and prove wrong their attempts, you can dismiss them out of hand. This is also part of why political debate has become so fraught with stereotypes, you’re not arguing against another person and trying to disprove their ideas, you’re ‘punching nazis’ or ‘owning the libs’. Instead of debating the person in front of you, your fighting a strawman of what you think they are, as they do the same to you. This is why I think American political discourse has withered, and I don’t think it’ll get any better until American’s find something else to base their lives around, an idea that is akin, to telling a devout religious person to change.

Jack’s experience with his own mortality is very similar to the crisis currently gripping the American economy. I’ve been messing around with day trading while I don’t have school to fill my hours, and noticed some interesting parallels between its Icarus esque fall from its previous highs and Jack’s experience in the book White Noise. People’s faith in not only the economy, but their employment, has been eroded by what for all intents and purposes can be described as a national disaster, and in an economy that operates on debt and faith, that is crippling. The American consumer has gone through an experience similar to Jack financially. They’ve been made aware that quarantine and job loss are not just potential eventualities, but instead a reality that could strike at any moment. Because of this, instead of say, taking on debt and buying a boat, and thereby keeping the money flowing and the capitalist machine churning, those people will instead save money in case of future hardship. This is bad for an economy that depends on flow, and is similar to Jack’s brush with mortality and the changes in lifestyle he brought about afterwards.

One of the main themes of White Noise is the idea that consumerism is bad. Specifically the brand of American, use up and discard consumerism that was developing in the 80’s when the book was published. Over the course of the book the main character, Jack :), initially lives deep within the throes of this brand of consumerism, until after his brush with his own mortality when he begins to cast off the excess needs thrust upon him by his society. This is a realization that I think we all need to come to at some point in our lives, that much of what modern society is based around, instead of being the parts of life that are meaningful and important, are instead excess fluff that distracts us from what really matter. White Noise obscuring the true meaning our lives could take on, if only we let them. It is important to remember especially in times such as these when much of the American economy is hamstrung by stay at home orders, that much of what really matters in life, isn’t available in a store catalogue.

Something I’ve found fascinating while reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is how it deals with the concept of luck and how critical being lucky is to surviving in the world he creates. In a world where death is around every corner, every engagement or interaction with any person could result in your permanent end. There’s a scene where the kid enters a bar looking for a drink without any money, threatens the bar tender until he gives him a drink, then fights and kills the bartender. Later in that scene he kills two bystander who stood up for the bartender and declared him in the wrong. That concept, that luck is what one needs to survive, not skill, or diplomacy, is what makes the western setting the book takes place in so uniquely terrifying. There’s another scene where the kid joins a militia that’s continuing the Mexican-American war after the US Government already signed a treaty with the Mexicans. They attempt to attack what looks like a couple of men driving some stolen cattle, and end up getting ambushed by Indians. The kid survives again, purely through luck and not through any abilities or skills of his own, while hundreds of what were his comrades are slaughtered around him. This is terrifying to me, the idea that you can prepare for every eventuality, master every skill, execute every decision correctly, and still get snuffed out by some psychopath who’s lucky and seemingly unkillable.

I perceive Ed Tom Bell as a rather stereotypical small town sheriff. He has pre-conceived notions about both “his people” and “outsiders” and different methods and rules of engagement for dealing with each. This is evident when he describes Moss as a good old boy, even though he’s a prime suspect in the investigation, and as he constantly refers to the dead people in the desert as drug runners and Mexicans

The primary reason for the inclusion of the soliloquies is give a depth to Ed Tom Bell’s experience by providing specific examples and to further highlight that the crimes and killings he’s dealing with are something he’s never seen before. Ed is aware of how out of his depth he is when attempting to investigate the ‘doperunners’ as he remarks to Tobert “I ain’t sure we’ve seen these people before. Their kind.” (79)