White Noise

Up until now, the novel’s Hitler motif has served primarily to reveal Jack’s imposter syndrome and to draw attention to his attempts to transcend death through a larger-than-life figure. But in Chapter 15, the book engages more closely with what Hitler means to Jack and what compelled him to build a field of study around the genocidal dictator. In his lecture to Murray’s students, Jack’s characterization of Hitler’s oratory is not unlike Murray’s analysis of television. Like television, Hitler is a “medium of revelation” (72). Jack also describes Hitler’s ability to hypnotize crowds:

 “Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd” (73).

The irony is not lost on Jack that, as he lectures, a crowd gathers around him. But the college is one of the few places that does not feed his fear of dying: “Death was strictly a professional matter here” (73).

In Chapter 17, as the family shares dubious pieces of trivia at a rapid-fire pace, Jack ponders the role that misinformation plays in preserving family cohesion. He paraphrases Murray: Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become” (81). The flip-side of this, however, is the paranoia that can emerge amid systems of misinformation. Denise and Heinrich are both especially susceptible to flimsy theories about the dangers of various chemicals. Denise, for example, chastises her mother for buying sugarless gum containing chemicals that harm rats. In Chapter 16, when Wilder won’t stop crying, Babette anxiously brings him to the doctor only to be told that there’s nothing wrong with him and that she should have stayed home. Jack, on the other hand, is comforted by Wilder’s wailing. While he fears death in a broad sense, he usually doesn’t succumb to paranoia over specific threats.

Meanwhile, Jack’s attitude toward consumerism is complicated in Chapter 17, when the family goes Christmas shopping. The feeling he gets at the Mid-Village Mall is almost like a drug-induced mania. He narrates, “My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last” (83). He frames his consumerism as a sort of cosmic generosity, earning karma with each purchase. But when the shopping bonanza is over, Jack and the rest of the Gladneys “crash” so to speak, suffering a hangover of alienation as each family member goes to his or her respective room alone.

In an earlier chapter, Alfonse tells Jack, “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set” (66). These two worlds collide at the end of Chapter 20, when the Gladneys and Murray see Babette teaching her posture class on television. Jack is overcome by “a sense of psychic disorientation” (102) made all the more surreal by the lack of sound. Jack repeats Murray’s observation about the significance of the waves and radiation transmitting all this data. But the fact that the data adds up to the maternal figure in their family unit sparks a huge sense of disquiet in Jack. Babette seems at once more real and less real by the fact that she is now a part of the TV’s electronic buzz. When Wilder reaches out to touch the television and then cries when the program is over, it puts Murray’s previous statements about watching television through the eyes of a child in a new and startling light.