discuss at length how they each hope to be the first
to die and argue at length about which of them will
suffer more as the survivor (although we learn that
Jack does not really want to die first, simply because
he does not want to die at all). Babette’s anxieties are
more pronounced than she will admit to Jack; she is,
in fact, secretly taking Dylar, an experimental drug
that purportedly suppresses the fear of death. Her
daughter Denise finds the medication and turns it
over to Jack, who spends much of the novel trying
to find out what the drug is, what it is for, and how
Babette gets it. He finds that Babette is cheating on
him—the maker of Dylar, Willie Mink, demands
sex as payment for the drug. This affair provides Jack
with an excuse for tracking down and even shooting
Mink, but his quest has been as much about revenge
as it has been about getting the drug for himself.
One of the novel’s concerns is the way we define
ourselves according to how we respond to death.
Babette’s fear of death is abstract; Jack’s is more
concrete. Jack is exposed to Neodene D when a train
derails and releases the chemical in a toxic cloud; he
steps out of his car during the ensuing evacuation,
and the brief exposure is enough to raise concerns
for the technicians at the evacuation site. They are
unable to tell Jack anything certain, though. The
most informative one can be is to tell him that
Neopryne D has a life span of 30 years, that they
will know more about it in 15 years, and if Jack is
still alive then, he can take comfort in knowing that
he is halfway there. At the same time, the technician
offers the standard reassurances that Jack’s situation
is really no different from anyone else’s, telling him
that he should proceed with his life plans as if noth-
ing has changed. Jack cannot take these words to
heart, though, and begins to obsess about death as
much as Babette does.
Events throughout the novel serve to counter the
dire and grim anxieties that Babette and Jack share.
Jack thinks death has come to claim him early one
morning when he sees his father-in-law, Vernon,
sitting in the backyard without recognizing him;
when Vernon leaves a few days later, he lists all of
his physical ailments but insists they are nothing to
worry about. Jack’s six-year-old, Wilder, rides his tri-
cycle across a busy highway without incident. After
Jack shoots Willie Mink, he immediately begins
working to save his life and is surprised to learn that
the nuns at the hospital he goes to have no belief in
an afterlife; one says that the comfort of the afterlife
is a fiction they maintain to comfort everyone else.
When all the novel’s conversations and discussions
and examinations of the topic are over, we are left
with a complexly structured and uneasy acceptance
of death’s omnipresence and inevitability, an explo-
ration of contemporary spiritual malaise and the
resulting cultural obsession with death.
Michael Littlescience and tecHnOlOGy in White Noise
Jack Gladney’s 14-year-old son, Heinrich, has a
receding hairline, and Gladney wonders if he has
ignorantly or irresponsibly allowed his son to be
exposed to something dangerous in the air. Tech-
nology in White Noise is mysterious, pervasive, and
only seemingly under control. It is transparent
enough that characters tend not to think about how
they use it, what it does, how it works, or even its
dangers, and it is complex enough that characters
do not know what to do about it when the dangers
become real. Often, the technological source of the
danger is unknowable. When the local grade school
is evacuated because of something that gives the kids
headaches (and will even kill an investigator), the
cause is indeterminate: “... it could be the ventilat-
ing system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation,
the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays
emitted by microcomputers.. .” and the list con-
tinues from there, including the protective suits the
investigators wear.
The novel’s characters are seen to live with an
almost reckless relationship to technology, using it
but not understanding anything about it. Heinrich
lectures his family about the hidden dangers of
radiation coming from power lines, police radar,
microwaves, radio, and television, while Glad-
ney’s wife Babette is taking an experimental drug,
Dylar, that promises to inhibit the fear of death.
She knows nothing about how it works or what
it might be doing to her, and Gladney enlists the
help of a neuroscientist to investigate the drug
and determine what effects it has. Before she can
identify the drug’s purpose or effects, she is able
to identify the mechanics of how it works, how330 DeLillo, Don