Great American Novels

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.

In the Awakening, many relationships are formed and some eventually result broken. The first little relationship we have is between the married couple- Léonce Ponteillier and Edna Pointellier. We learn quickly that Edna is the clear protagonist of the novel and everything is based around her. Leonce, the husband, is a self absorbed man who thinks he can buy her wife anything she wants and she will just automatically fall in love with him. He thinks highly of himself and considers himself a good person. Edna begins to lose feelings when she meets a new man, which is the next relationship I am going to be talking about, Robert Lebrun. Robert kind of has a small role at the start but I noticed he has a flirty personality and he’s good around the kids which Edna loves. Madame (Adele) Ratigonolle and Edna are another unique relationship and they are really good friends. Just a little backstory on Madame Ratigonolle, she lives in New Orleans and is considered a Creole wife. A Creole wife is a wife who always no matter what, places their children and husband before them. That is one of the many things that differs in Adele and Edna’s relationship.It is odd because they are good friends but are total opposites of each other. It does raise tension in the relationship between her and Leonce, because he believes that Edna doesn’t favor the kids or him as much as he would like her too, which I guess you could say it partly true. Not about the kids but about him. Robert and Edna are hanging out with Adele when she starts to notice something. She feels like some sort of spell coming on. Frightened, Edna and Robert spray her like cologne so it goes away because they don’t want Adele finding out about them because she would freak out. The spell goes away and Adele suspects absolutely nothing. In chapter seven, Edna spills the beans about a lot of her past relationships not mentioning Robert though. The next relationship that takes place is in chapter 10 with Edna and Mademoiselle Reisz. This is another unique relationship because although they don’t really have much in common they are similar in some ways. For example, Mademoiselle Reisz is unmarried with no children and spends a lot of time playing the piano which she is very good at. She’s like a free independent woman which is why she kind of relates to Edna. It doesn’t seem like Edna is super free but she for sure is an independent woman. At this point Robert and Edna are starting to get a little more serious but Robert is acting weird because it seems like he was avoiding her a little bit in chapter 10. They hang out a little bit at the end but you can tell something is off. In chapter 11 the relationship between Leonce and Edna is slowly going off the rails. Edna refuses to join Leonce in the cottage and is really starting to distance herself from him. As she spends more time with Robert she really starts to lose interest in Leonce. Just when everything seemed perfect Robert suddenly departed leaving Edna. Confused and upset Edna doesn’t really know how to react because she was starting to pursue a relationship with him. Edna starts to have flashbacks because stuff like this has happened to her in the past ruining relationships. She then questions herself and feels like she is not good enough. One of the last relationships I am going to address is the relationship between madame Lebrun and Edna. It is a little odd considering this is Robert’s mother but her and Edna start to become friends. Edna tells the truth about Robert and how she likes him and she feels no guilt telling her that. This is one of the first people Edna has told and she really opens up about it telling her pretty much everything. Madame Lebrun doesn’t get mad or anything and just listens. Edna likes being able to talk to someone who knows so much about Robert. On her way to the beach after the little chat with Lebrun she sees Mademoiselle Reisz who gives her a bit of information. She says that Robert used to beat his brother for being jealous of an innocent relationship with a girl by the name of Mariequita. Edna gets a little bit of Robert’s dark side but I don’t think it really troubles her. She still misses Robert deeply and wants him to come back.

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.

While listening to my dad’s old (although he won’t tell you that it’s old) music with him in the car one day, it gave me inspiration for a curated list: Chigurh’s playlist. So, below I have a few different songs and a short justification as to why I think these would be on his playlist.

1. You don’t mess around with Jim – Jim Croce

This is on the playlist purley because of the name. We learn very quickly in No Country For Old Men not to mess around with Chigurh, since he has really no issue killing anyone at any time. I also feel as if he would be listening to this song on his way to go hunt someone down.

2. Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen

The iconic Queen hit, in my opinion, would for sure be something Chigurh listens to. It has its ups and downs, and the emotions are all over the place. I think he would listen to this or think of this song while he was planning an escape to somewhere, or like in the novel, how to find the briefcase with all of the money.

3. I Will Survive – Gloria Gaynor

While at first glance this may not be a song that Chigurh would listen to, I think it would be on his playlist for some odd reason. One of those things where you would be completely thrown a curveball when you find out that this is on his playlist. I think it also speaks to the fact that he truly can not be killed or taken down. Yes, death in inevitable, but he always seems to find a way to come back.

One of the major themes in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is love. Love can be seen throughout the novel and is seen as a good thing and a bad thing. Some of the main characters are searching for love but they never really end up finding a genuine relationship or true love. All of them use meaningless relationships to fill a void they’re feeling and most of them are scared to commit to someone. One example of love seen in the novel is through Lady Brett Ashley and Jake. Jake is in love with Brett Ashley and Brett has told Jake that she likes him. However, there are many other guys that Brett also likes and she can’t commit to a relationship with Jake because of his accident during the war. I think Jake and Brett would be good together because it would stop their cycle of pointless relationships in the past. 

Another major theme throughout this novel is identity. All of the main characters and wandering around from country to country and none of them really have a purpose in life or anything they really want to do. None of them have a job they have to go to, which helps them be careless in their everyday lives because they aren’t responsible to anyone. I think all of them use alcohol to fill the void of them not being able to figure out who they are and what they want to do with their lives.

For this blog I am going to talk about quotes that stood out to me and ones that were interesting. The first quote is from Chigurh and he said, “1958. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it.” This quote is from when he’s at the gas station and it’s the coin toss scene. I think it’s interesting how Chigurh notes when the coin is from and how he believes that it’s been traveling for twenty-two years. To Chigurh, every event in your life leads you to where you eventually end up. Another part of this quote that’s strange is how Chigurh is making the worker call it. He’s putting the life of the man into a coin toss, which is based just on luck. I think Chigurh justifies killing people if they pick the wrong side of the coin because he thinks that was fait and that person chose their life choices that lead them to that event.

Another quote I like from the novel is when Chigurh said, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? This is the best deal you’re going to get. I won’t tell you that you can save yourself, because you can’t.” I liked this quote because I think it describes Chigurh perfectly. He doesn’t really care about other people’s feelings and that’s seen through this quote. He’s blaming the rule someone followed in their life and relating it to where it lead them now. Also he doesn’t sugar coat anything. In that quote he says how people shouldn’t even bother trying to save themselves because it’s too late.

For this blog post I decided to do a review on the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo. I thought it was interesting to read and kept you wondering what was going to happen next. One of the main themes in this novel is the fear of death. Babette and Jack are both very scared of death and often talk about who they think will die first. The quote, “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. ” This quote shows that they’re both afraid to die and that they’re always fearing death in the back of their mind. I think this theme is relatable to readers because most people are afraid of death.

To me, the most interesting part of the novel was when Jack set out to kill Dr. Gray. I was hoping that Jack wouldn’t follow through with killing him because Babette would have to raise the kids all alone. Eventually, Jack has a change of heart and doesn’t kill this man. I think this is because he realizes that the man is just human and doesn’t deserve to die. 

Tommy Lee Jones portraying Ed Tom Bell in the movie adaptation for No Country for Old Men is probably the best thing we all could’ve ever asked for. The entire time we were reading that book as a class, I couldn’t help but picture him as Bell. The way he looks, acts, and carries himself all fit perfectly into that character, and he made the book that was made for the screen ten times better. His quiet yet intimidating demeanor is something that makes that casting even more perfect, since that is not something Tommy Lee Jones is foreign too. While I think that the movie overall did a great job casting all of the characters, Tommy Lee Jones being casted as Ed Tom Bell was my favorite, and something I’m sure others can agree with as well. He’s stern, but has a sweet side to him at the same time, which in my opinion is the biggest part of Bell’s personality. There’s no question that Jones acted well in this film, like he has so many other films as well. At the end of the day, I honestly don’t think I can think of anyone better to play Bell. Such a good casting that I will forever be thankful for.

Here is a book cover for The Awakening. The sea is a central theme in the book, and something that Edna engages with a lot. She learns how to swim, she wants to swim farther than anyone else has ever before, and at the end of the book she commits suicide by swimming far out into the sea so that she is physically unable to swim back to the shore. As a way of engaging with the text, I looked up other images of women and the sea and chose one which I think could serve as a better book cover for The Awakening than the one pictured above. The image I chose portrays a shadowy, almost mist-like, silhouette of a woman wading into the water. Other than the obvious connection to the novel’s ending, the blurriness of the picture, and the fact that the woman’s face is obscured, fits the tone of the novel because Edna is in deep emotional turmoil and is confused about her identity as a woman and a mother. At the end of the book she is hardly present in her family or community and I think this image captures that.  It is similar to the real book cover because the woman’s face is unseen and the sea is a prominent aspect. In many ways, the two images have a similar composition and color palate. The reason why I think it could be a better, more updated book cover is because of the subtlety of the colors and the ghost-like appearance of the woman, it hints at the intense sadness of Edna in The Awakening.

One day while driving to who knows where, I had my music on shuffle and the song Hollywood’s Bleeding by Post Malone came on, and I couldn’t help but think of The Day of the Locust. In the novel, the painting Tod is curating is called “The burning of Los Angeles,” so right away I compared the names to each other. While the entire book focuses on how distraught Hollywood truly is and how the love life there isn’t what the media makes it out to seem, the song is more focussed on the fact that it’s crumbling, and will continue to due to all of the fake people and materialism that goes on. The lyric that stands out most to me in this song says “dying in our sleep, we’re living out a dream,” which to me says that all of these people had a life long dream of moving to L.A. and becoming some type of stat, but truly had no idea what they were getting themselves into at the time. The line then continues by saying “we only make it out alone.” Re-listening to this, it made me sad by realizing that at the end of the day, Post Maloe is right, and all these people truly have is themselves.