Author: Peter Lynch

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.

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.

One of the reasons I chose to read The Road was because I already read No Country for Old Men which is by the same author, Cormac McCarthy. I enjoyed No Country for Old Men because of the unique prose and writing style. This bland, straight forward writing style was also apparent in The Road. What is interesting to note is how McCarthy treats the characters of the two different novels and how they are similar and different. As we discussed when reading No Country for Old Men, McCarthy treats characters in a unique way. Throughout the novel, we follow the story Llewelyn Moss, who, as we all know, acquires over two million dollars from a drug deal gone wrong. Throughout the novel we follow him with the money until he is suddenly killed and the story just continued. Meaning that we didn’t dwell on his death too long. It was interesting because up until then he was a major character and, I personally thought, the main character. The treatment of the characters is similar and different in The Road. For one, the story right from the start focuses on two characters and really focuses the man and his thoughts. Throughout the novel we follow them both through the thoughts of the man and we get really in depth experiences with the character as they rarely ever see other people. A difference in the treatment of characters in how the characters are treated in their deaths. In No Country for Old Men, Moss’ death is overlooked and not focused. His death isn’t even a scene; we just see the aftermath. While in The Road, the death of one of the main characters is a huge focus as we get a lot of detail of what happens. For example, he asked the boy not to perch a tent so that he can see the sky. I think this is done because The Road in a much simpler story with less characters than No Country for Old Men.

            Another theme prevalent in the novel is the bond between father and son. For the most part, in this post-apocalyptic world, the bond and relationship between father and son is the same as the root feelings between father and son in our society. The feelings of love and want to nature and protect from the father and the feelings of love and admiration from the son are shown in many ways. The first example is when they find a pop machine with a single Coca-Cola in. The father give it to the child as a gift because he knows how sweet the taste is and how much he’ll enjoy it. It’s the same as a father giving a gift to their son today. The other prime example of the father/son relationship is when the son learns to float. While traveling, they find a waterfall with a pool of water. While they’re there the father teaches the son how to float. The father encourages him telling him “you’re doing good” and he just takes this moment to enjoy life for a little. Although it seems very simple, the scene really shows a call back to the past world. Today, the idea of a father teaching their son to do something is very prominent. Teaching them to ride a bike, to play catch, or to swim are all examples of this. I believe the sole purpose of this scene is to demonstrate that even in this post-apocalyptic world, there can still be this father son relationship or event that distracts them from what’s happening.

            One of the prominent themes that struck me was the theme of Good Guys and Bad guys. The first mention of this is when the father explains to the boy that they are the ‘Good Guys’ and that they are trying to find other good people. Being young, the boy accepts this and holds it to heart. But this concept is challenged throughout the novel. One of the examples of this is when the roadagents or bad men get stuck on the road and find the man and the boy hiding. To protect the boy, the man shoots the roadagent in the back of the head and kills him. This causes the boy to question whether they are the good guys or not and the father reassures him that they are. We also see the boy questioning whether they are good when they come across the thief and leave him to die and when the man shoots the archer with the flare. The concept of good and bad is played out in several different stories but it’s important to analyze the concept. For one, I think it is interesting that almost always in human nature, we make ourselves the good guys and we justify whatever we do. People will take this too extreme to justify immoral actions they take that most will see as bad. But in the road, the characters no longer have the luxury of morality or living by an honest code. The only rule is to survive and by any means necessary. The man’s goal is to protect the boy at all costs from any form of harm, to the point where he would kill the boy to prevent him from suffering. The road shows us, the reader, that morality is a luxury in our modern-day society and that the characters in the novel have to abandon past morals to survive.

A) As one of the main characters in the novel, we learn a lot about Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, especially through his soliloquies at the start of every part. I see Bell as an old man. The stories he tells show that he has a lot of experience within the law and the stories shows us different lessons he’s learned or ideas hes pondered. For example, in the second soliloquy, he tells the story of where he stopped a truck with Coahuila plates. At the end of the story he talks about how dangerous his job is and how you never know what you might come across. This story also shows a slight amount of racial profiling. He stopped the car because it had mexican plates which is racial profiling. This was probably cultivated through is upbringing or experiences on the job with mexican cartel

B) The soliloquies serve two purposes. One to show us more information about Bell. We get more insight into his opinions about the law and his job. We get unique stories about Bell that help develop his character so that we can better understand the actions that he takes throughout the sections. The soliloquies also serve as an intro into each section. For example in the second section, Bell’s soliloquy talks about two men who traveled around the country killing people for what seemed like no good reason. This is probably how Bell feels about Chigurh, who his killing people for what seems like no reason.