Key themes
- Consumer culture as a defence against death anxiety
- The Airborne Toxic Event — environmental catastrophe as media spectacle
- Knowledge, expertise and the professional language that obscures rather than reveals
About this book
Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at a small American college, lives with his family in a consumer-saturated suburban world — until an 'Airborne Toxic Event' forces an evacuation and makes death suddenly tangible. DeLillo's National Book Award-winning novel is one of the central texts of postmodern American fiction, satirising media, consumerism and the American terror of mortality.
Published in 1985, White Noise won the National Book Award and established DeLillo as one of the central figures of postmodern American fiction. He spent years immersed in supermarket culture and television to write it.
Discussion questions
- Jack Gladney has created an entire academic field — Hitler Studies — around a figure he is fascinated by and afraid of. What is DeLillo saying through this detail about the relationship between fascination, fear and academic prestige?
- The 'Airborne Toxic Event' is experienced by the Gladney family partly through media coverage of itself. What is DeLillo saying about the relationship between real experience and its media representation?
- The novel is saturated with brand names, advertising language and consumer goods. What does DeLillo achieve through this accumulation — and is the novel itself in danger of celebrating what it critiques?
- Jack and Babette are both secretly afraid of death. How does DeLillo use this shared secret to explore the way couples relate to each other — and to their own fears?
- White Noise is described as a postmodern novel. What specifically postmodern techniques does DeLillo use — and what human concerns do they serve or obscure?
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