White Noise

After the intense emotional climax of Jack and Babette’s admissions to one another, the book readopts the absurdist tone of earlier chapters when Jack encounters a SIMUVAC disaster simulation in progress. The disaster drill leader represents a satirical exaggeration of bureaucracy at its worst. The man says, “We learned a lot during the night of the billowing cloud. But there is no substitute for a planned simulation” (195). The primacy of artifice over reality, explored deftly in novel’s portrayal of “The Most Photographed Barn in America,” has invaded the American bureaucracy. While Murray’s navel-gazing seminars on barns, cereal boxes, and television frame this divide in relatively trivial terms, it is troubling for Jack to see this approach applied to government agencies devoted to disaster preparation and readiness. The absurdity of this approach is escalated even further when the leader says, “If reality intrudes in the form of a car crash or a victim falling off a stretcher, it is important to remember we are not here to mend broken bones or put out real fires. We are here to simulate” (196).

In Chapter 30 Jack is exposed to a fresh perspective on mortality when he reveals what he knows about Dylar to Winnie. She suggests that while a fear of death may have unhealthy consequences, an awareness of death is vital to humanity. Winnie says, “You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit” (217). She adds that rather than the slow-burning and ubiquitous fear of death Jack experiences, a more valuable form of death-fear comes when, for example, encountering a grizzly bear in the wild. “The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange,” she tells Jack, “that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self—the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation” (218). While Jack doesn’t find this advice helpful in a practical sense, he is grateful, telling her, “I’m still sad, Winnie, but you’ve given my sadness a richness and depth it has never known before” (218).

While Jack’s reaction to Babette’s sexual infidelity is initially muted, he is haunted by images of Mr. Gray in the grubby motel room. These images take the form of a phantom: “Gray-bodied, staticky, unfinished” (230). This characterization likens Mr. Gray to the white noise of a television set, or the white noise he imagines as the substance of death. When he is overtaken by gloom, he describes it using the term “Panasonic” (230). DeLillo originally wanted to name the novel Panasonic, but the television manufacturer Panasonic raised objections with the author’s publisher. Had the corporation not objected, this would have drawn an even more direct correlation between death and the television set. As for the word itself, it connotes a state of being in which one is engulfed by sound on all sides. To Jack, the buzz of technology, the fear of death, and the ghastly aura of Mr. Gray have become a deafening din.

In the last of these chapters, Babette’s father Vernon Dickey visits unannounced. While his most important role in the plot is to give Jack the pistol, Vernon also serves as an illuminating foil to Jack. Despite being older, a smoker, and far more unhealthy and closer to death than Jack is, Vernon has little concern or anxiety over his own mortality. As he leaves Blacksmith, Babette begins to cry, saddened that this may be the last time she sees him alive. Vernon launches into a long speech about how Babette shouldn’t worry about his limp, his cough, his smoking, his loose teeth, his loose women, his eyes, or his shakes. The speech culminates in an exhortation to “forget the mind completely. The mind goes before the body. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. So don’t worry about the mind” (243). Fear is in the mind, not the body. If the mind is already lost by the time the body dies, this may offer a loophole for those who fear death. Jack doesn’t pursue this logic, however, suggesting that it is insufficient to quell his own fears.