328 DeLillo, Don
focusing on the options, even if they are limited,
makes him appear more of a sovereign of the island
than a victim.
Crusoe’s survival skills include his repeated
escapes from and defeats of human enemies, as well
as his rescues of others. On the island, he hides from
the cannibals that occasionally come there to make
feasts of the human prey they bring with them. One
of the cannibals’ captives escapes and survives with
Crusoe’s assistance. The man, whom Crusoe calls
Friday as they meet on a Friday, becomes his helper
and friend. Eventually, an English ship aboard
which there has been a mutiny comes to the island.
By helping the captain and his loyal men to escape
from the mutineers and reclaim the ship, Crusoe is
at last rescued from the island where he has survived
for 28 years and returns to England, where new life
challenges wait for him.
The story of the castaway who survives in the
wilderness can be regarded a salute to values that are
characteristic of the Enlightenment period of the
18th century, such as faith in the individual’s ability
to reason and in the virtues of self-reliance. More-
over, the inner development that the hero makes
from despair to constructive thinking and behavior
provides an aspect of the survival theme that can be
applied to many life situations and times.
Tilda Maria Forselius
DELILLO, DON White Noise (1985)
White Noise won the National Book Award for 1985
and is the first of Don DeLillo’s novels to achieve
widespread critical and popular acclaim. The novel
portrays American culture as fragmented, spiritually
adrift, and filled with the noise of entertainment,
technology, information, and commercialism. Above
all, it depicts the individual uncertainty and fear that
comes from trying to make sense of the culture’s
pervasive “white noise.”
At the center of the novel are Jack Gladney;
his wife, Babette; and their children from various
marriages, four of whom live with them. Gladney
holds the chair of Hitler studies at College-on-the-
Hill; one of his low-level anxieties emerges from
his inability to speak German, and he is taking
private German lessons in advance of an interna-
tional Hitler conference. His high-level anxiety is a
distracting and despairing fear of death, a fear that
he shares with his wife. One of the novel’s plot lines
involves Gladney’s discovery that Babette is taking
Dylar, an experimental drug that supposedly sup-
presses the fear of death. She has had an affair with
the drug’s creator, Willie Mink, and Gladney tracks
him with the mixed motives of seeking revenge and
getting the drug for himself. Another plot involves a
chemical spill that threatens the town and forces an
evacuation, during which Gladney is exposed. This
heightens his fear of death and spurs his interest in
finding Mink, whom he shoots but then takes to a
hospital. The novel ends with little resolution of the
anxieties that plague its characters.
Themes that inform the novel include ambition,
commodification/commercialization, death,
futility, individual and society, parenthood,
science and technology, and spirituality.
Michael LittlecOmmOdiFicatiOn/cOmmercializatiOn
in White Noise
The opening pages of White Noise recount Jack
Gladney’s observations as students move into their
dorms at College-on-the-Hill. Gladney begins by
telling us, in the first sentence, that the “station wag-
ons arrived at noon.” He mentions people—the stu-
dents—only a single time in the opening paragraph;
the bulk of his narration is dedicated to listing the
possessions that are unloaded, several identified
by their brand names. Much later in the novel, he
listens to his daughter Steffie mumble in her sleep
one night, knowing that he recognizes what she is
saying but is unable to figure it out. After several
minutes, he recognizes the words to be the name
of a car: Toyota Celica. Before he is able to identify
her words and what they mean, he is transfixed by
her mumbling. Once he places the words and makes
the connection, he is even more in awe. Trying to
figure out why he should be so moved to hear his
daughter mumble the name of a car, he decides that
there is something transcendent in her repetition of
a phrase that is universally known and embedded so
deeply in her consciousness that she chants it in her
sleep, while at the same time it is embedded in his
consciousness so deeply that he cannot even make