76 pages • 2 hours read
Don DeLilloWhite Noise
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 3, Chapters 34-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Dylarama”
Part 3, Chapter 34 Summary
Jack removes the cube of compacted garbage from beneath the sink and picks through it on the garage floor, desperately searching for the Dylar. He visits his physician, Dr. Chakravarty, with increasing frequency but refuses to reveal anything to the doctor about his Nyodene D exposure. During his most recent visit, Dr. Chakravarty expresses concern over Jack’s potassium levels and advises him to seek further testing at the Autumn Harvest Farms medical facility in nearby Glassboro.
Part 3, Chapter 35 Summary
Jack tells Babette that Denise trashed the remaining Dylar pills. Meanwhile, Babette still refuses to reveal Mr. Gray’s identity, certain that Jack will be tempted to carry out revenge. Jack tells her, “I depend on you to be the healthy outgoing former Babette. I need this as badly as you do, if not more” (251).
With Orest’s record-breaking snake feat on the horizon, Jack presses the young man on why he doesn’t fear dying from a snake bite. Orest responds, “I am nothing without the snakes” (253).
Later, Jack drives to the airport with Steffie, who opts to visit her mother in Mexico City rather than participate in the weekend’s disaster simulation. The next day, SIMUVAC performs a simulation for a noxious odor. Three days later, when there is an actual noxious odor, no official action is taken.
Part 3, Chapter 36 Summary
College-on-the-Hill’s big Hitler conference commences. Having abandoned his language lessons, Jack delivers an opening speech to the Hitler delegates that lasts only five minutes and is primarily made up of words that are the same in both English and German. He spends the duration of the conference hiding in his office.
Per his doctor’s instructions, Jack visits the Autumn Harvest Farms facility and undergoes a series of tests. During a post-test interview, a young doctor tells Jack that he has Nyodene D in his bloodstream. At first Jack pretends he’s never heard of Nyodene D but then betrays his knowledge of the chemical when he starts debating the doctor about its effect on humans. The doctor says that while the data is conflicting, Nyodene D exposure can definitely lead to fatal growths in humans.
Part 3, Chapter 37 Summary
Jack and Murray walk the campus all afternoon. Jack tells Murray about his toxic exposure and prognosis. After a long-ranging conversation about mortality, technology, and religion, Murray suggests that if Jack cannot repress his fear of death, there may be a way to conquer it: become a “killer” rather than a “dier.” Murray tells him, “Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit” (276). Jack carefully considers this, wondering if his long-standing aversion to plots and secrets has been a mistake.
Part 3, Chapter 38 Summary
Jack learns that Orest is in seclusion after getting bit a mere four minutes into his attempt to break the record for most days spent in a cage with poisonous snakes. He survives, however, having mistakenly procured snakes that weren’t really venomous.
On the day Jack starts bringing his gun to work, he senses that somebody is following him. After a tense chase, he realizes it is only Winnie. She tells Jack about a journal article she read about the secretive company behind Dylar and its project manager, Willie Mink. According to the article, Willie brought scandal to the company by conducting secret tests of Dylar in a motel room on a woman wearing a ski mask. Jack now knows that Willie is “Mr. Gray” and the woman in the ski mask is Babette. Finally, Winnie tells Jack that Willie still lives in a motel room in the Germantown neighborhood of Iron City.
At home Jack doesn’t tell Babette about Willie, but he does make ominous references to her ski mask. After Babette insists on taking the car to the stadium to run steps, Jack goes next door to steal the Stovers’ car, which has been parked in their driveway ready to go in case of disaster ever since the Airborne Toxic Event. He speeds off to Iron City in search of Willie Mink, running red lights and not paying tolls. He says that the way to escape death is to “[s]imply stop obeying. Steal instead of buy. Shoot instead of talk” (288).
Part 3, Chapter 39 Summary
After driving around Germantown for a long while, Jack finally finds the Roadway Motel. He lists the steps of his plan over and over in his head:
“Enter unannounced, gain his confidence, wait for an unguarded moment, take out the Zumwalt, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum slowness of agony, put the gun in his hand to suggest a lonely man’s suicide, write semi-coherent things on the mirror, leave Stover’s car in Treadwell’s garage” (292).
When Jack approaches Willie’s room, the door is already open. Willie sits on the bed watching television and shoving handfuls of Dylar into his mouth, crazed and incoherent from his apparent addiction. Willie assumes Jack is there to purchase Dylar.
Having consumed massive amounts of the drug, Willie is especially susceptible to its side effects. When Jack says “[f]alling plane,” Willie hits the floor, crawling into the bathroom in fear. As the scene moves closer to its violent climax, Jack perceives “white noise everywhere” (295) and experiences a heightened sense of reality.
As Willie huddles in the corner of the bathroom, Jack shoots him twice in the stomach and places the gun in Willie’s hand. When Jack starts to walk away, a still-conscious Willie pulls the trigger and fires the remaining bullet into Jack’s wrist. The gunshot and the pain in his wrist shatter Jack’s extrasensory reverie. “The extra dimensions, the super perceptions, were reduced to visual clutter,” Jack says, “a whirling miscellany, meaningless” (298). Jack decides to save Willie’s life. While dragging Willie to his car, Jack convinces the drug-addled man that he shot himself.
Jack drives Willie to a hospital staffed with German nuns. After discussing theology with one of the nuns, Jack learns that Willie will survive. He drives back to Blacksmith and leaves the Stovers’ car where he found it, its back seat now soaked in blood.
Part 3, Chapter 40 Summary
The final chapter takes place at an indeterminate time that summer. Wilder tricycles across the highway as screaming, honking drivers barely avoid striking him. Wilder remains calm throughout the ordeal until he falls into a creek on the other side of the highway and begins to cry. A passing motorist stops to pick him up and take him home.
That summer, the sunsets become even more unspeakably beautiful, drenched in chemicals from the Airborne Toxic Event. The men in Mylex suits still haven’t left Blacksmith.
The final scene is set at the supermarket. As the book ends, Jack reflects on the secret messages found in product codes and tabloid magazines. He says, “Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks” (310).
Part 3, Chapters 34-40 Analysis
Jack’s desperation reaches new heights as he digs through a slimy cube of compacted garbage in search for the Dylar pills. The act provides more evidence that his worship of consumer culture has waned. As he encounters clots of hair, crushed roaches, and a tampon stuck in a banana, Jack asks himself, “Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness?” (247). In the past, consumerism offered a sense of stability and comfort that helped sand the ragged edges off his fear of death. Faced now with the degraded final destination of all that pretty packaging Murray loves, Jack is forced to confront his powerlessness in the face of death. Jack is equally outmatched when he visits the Autumn Harvest Farms medical facility and receives further confirmation that his Nyodene D levels mean there is a high likelihood for the growth of a “nebulous mass” (266).
By Chapter 37, Jack has exhausted every possible antidote to his death-fear with little to show for it. Consumerism is just pre-garbage. Medicine tells him what he already knows. Babette fears death as much as he does and thus offers little solace. Religion is never seriously considered because Jack cannot convince himself that an afterlife exists. When Murray echoes Winnie’s suggestion that a knowledge of death makes life more precious, Jack responds, “What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety?” (271). Even his Hitler studies can’t save him. He spends the bulk of the Hitler conference hiding in his office. The only option that intrigues Jack is Murray’s speech on killers and diers, though he requires some convincing. “Plot a murder, you’re saying,” Jack says in response to Murray’s idea, “[b]ut every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not” (278). Murray counters, “To plot is to live” (278).
While Murray insists on the theoretical nature of his argument, Jack puts it into practice. When carrying out his plan to kill Willie, Jack crosses over into the tribe of “plotters” whom he once detested. He even repeats the steps of the plot in his head, over and over again. As the moment of violence grows nearer, Jack becomes enveloped in white noise. Rather than tormented, he feels exhilarated by his proximity to death because he is now in control of it. When the plan goes awry, he quickly finds new purpose in saving Willie’s life, now exhilarated by a sense of his own virtue despite the fact that he initiated the danger in the first place. He wonders, “Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life?” (299).
Only at the hospital does Jack meaningfully engage with religion as a possible antidote to his fear of death. Sister Hermann Marie tells him that nuns only believe in God and the afterlife because, if they didn’t, the nonbelievers would fall into chaos and despair. She tells him, “There is no truth without fools” (304). But rather than compound his despair, this encounter with the nun strikes Jack as beautiful. His sense of well-being at the end of Chapter 39 is not explicitly explained, but it is possible that he has conquered death by being neither killer nor dier, but rather a saver of a life, having delivered Willie to the hospital.
The final chapter is cryptic. Wilder’s death-defying tricycle stunt suggests a governing principle surrounding death so random that it’s best to approach it with the blithe nature of a child. It is perhaps for this reason that Jack ducks his doctor’s calls, refusing to learn what the expensive medical equipment has to say about his condition—out of fear, maybe, but also out of a commitment to ignorance.
It is fitting that the book ends in the supermarket. Here, Jack once again revisits the phrase “waves and radiation” (310), only now he uses it to describe the language that the dead use to speak to the living, expressed through product scanners and tabloid magazines.
Related Titles
By Don DeLillo
