Waves and Radiation:

Chapter 1:

The narrator, Jack Gladney, describes the annual arrival of station wagons, students, and their parents at his college, College-on-the-Hill. He believes the event reassures the parents that they are part of a larger group. Jack walks into his quiet town, where he makes his home with his wife, Babette, and their children by previous marriages. He invented the concept of Hitler studies in 1968, and is now the chairman of Hitler studies at the college.

Analysis

The parade of station wagons is a deservedly famous opening for the novel. The cars resembles a modernized version of nomads, their (Dodge) caravans stacked with accoutrements and nourishment. That they go through the "west campus" may even be a sign that dropping one's kids off at college is the new kind of Western colonization.

DeLillo goes to great lengths to catalogue their packs because they do, in fact, resemble glossy catalogues. In this consumerist world, DeLillo suggests that people buy things to join groups, and that these groups are somehow reassuring. Even the items are grouped together in subtle ways -- note the preponderance of items that begin with the letter "b" or "s" in the first round ("boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheetsŠ"). This concept of groups and safety will assume greater importance throughout the novel.

Also notable here is the last item listed -- "Mystic mints." Why are mints given such a lofty term, beyond alliterative purposes? Other items, especially the string of electronic ones which involve sound (stereos, radios, etc.), may also gain significance throughout the novel. For now, however, DeLillo provides only one hint when Jack describes the "remote and steady murmur around our sleep" of the expressway behind his house, like "dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream." There is some kind of connection between sounds and death, though it remains unclear as of now.

The description of the expressway also foreshadows a crucial event in the novel. While White Noise is mostly a novel of ideas, of characters expressing different beliefs, it is also structured carefully, and it is worthwhile to keep DeLillo's plotting in mind -- and also what the idea of plotting means (something else that will be explored later).

Chapter 2:

In his kitchen, Jack tells Babette about the station wagons and their rich inhabitants. She is an "ample" woman who teaches in an adult education program, and volunteers to read to the blind -- she reads supermarket tabloids once a week to an elderly man, Old Man Treadwell. Jack is happily married to her, feeling she handles the world with ease, especially compared to his former wives. Babette brings in her toddler, Wilder, and their daughters, Denise (Babette's) and Steffie (Jack's), come in for lunch. Heinrich, Jack's only son, briefly comes in and leaves. The smoke alarm goes off, though they ignore it.

Analysis:

Babette brims with life -- she's active, "ample," and is the nucleus of the family. However, her apparent fixation on death -- she finds it hard to "imagine death" at high income levels and is concerned with her health -- foreshadows future conflict. Jack also wonders why the possessions from their previous marriages "carry such sorrowful weight," which scare him not because of the reminders of the failed marriages, but because of "something more general." This "something more general" is the crux of White Noise, the dark cloud overhead that causes Jack's deep-rooted anxiety. That Jack has invented Hitler studies points us to an answer; he is obsessed with the man who is synonymous with death in the 20th-century.

More foreshadowing occurs when they ignore the smoke alarm, an emergency sound that normally heralds death. A great irony is that the smoke alarm could be going off because it has "died"; either way, death is present in the sound of the alarm, and this is the first example of "white noise" in the novel, of the background noise that supposedly wards off death but, in fact, only announces its presence.

Chapter 3:

As do the other department heads, Jack wears a sleeveless black academic robe on campus. Hitler studies shares a building with the popular culture department, headed by Alfonse Stompanato. Jack is friends with Murray Jay Siskind, a Jewish visiting lecturer on "living icons" who finds some of the subject material of popular culture absurd. Murray is pleased to be in the town of Blacksmith, where he can be away from the "eventual death heat" of cities and not worry about sexual entanglements with women. Murray praises Jack's groundbreaking work on Hitler, and says he wants to do the same with Elvis Presley.

A few days later, Jack accompanies Murray to the country to what signs call "the most photographed barn in America." They watch the hordes of camera-wielding tourists. Murray takes notes and comments that the signs make it impossible to see the barn for what it really is; they turn the barn into a "collective perception," an inescapable "aura."

Analysis:

Since Murray, an urban intellectual Jew, is very much the opposite of Elvis, an All-American Southern musician, we may assume part of his fascination with Elvis stems from their duality. Though we don't know much about Jack yet, his attraction to Hitler probably comes from similar oppositions. Hitler is still a mystery to most people, who wonder, at the simplest level, how a human could be so full of evil, hatred, and the capacity for death. Since Jack heads Hitler studies, and not a more general Nazi studies, it is clear that he also finds Hitler a compelling, mysterious figure.

Murray says the college now has an "identity" because of Jack's pioneering Hitler studies. Jack, too, has acquired a new identity for his studies. For one, his robe makes him part of a group, the department heads. Moreover, he is the foremost authority on Hitler, and as such he has taken on some of Hitler's mystique. There will be more on this later, but for now it is important to remember that Hitler studies shares its building with the popular culture department; to Jack, Hitler's ascendance was not so much the historical product of economically depressed and racially outraged Germany, but a figure alongside Elvis who held sway over the populace with his aura.

And "aura" is a key word in this chapter. The most-photographed barn episode is one of the more famous scenes in modern literature. It accords with one of the major ideas from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's 1983 book, Simulations: that in modern society, the reproduced simulation has replaced the original reality. In Baudrillard's prime example, he argues that Disneyland, a simulated fantasy environment, is somehow more "real" to us than "reality." In White Noise, Murray makes the same point; it is only the most-photographed barn because signs constantly reinforce the "aura" of its being photographed -- these signs, or simulacra, as Baudrillard refers to them, dictate reality. As a result, the tourists cannot see the "real" barn anymore, but only the simulated, photographed barn -- and this is the barn that is real to them.

There is another great irony in the scene that often goes unnoticed. David Foster Wallace, in his book of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, points out that while Murray critiques the tourists for voyeuristically participating in the spectacle of the barn, Murray, too, is guilty of voyeurism. While Murray does not fixate on the barn, as a professor of popular culture he fixates on the tourists, and his notes surround them with an aura much as their photographs surround the barn with an aura. The tourists may not be able to see the barn anymore, and may be "taking pictures of taking pictures," but Murray cannot see himself, and he is even further removed from reality, taking notes of people taking pictures of taking pictures.

Chapter 4:

Jack comments on the general compulsion to overeat in bad times. He goes to the high school stadium and watches Babette run up and down the steps. He compares her hyper-activity with his own passivity, and wonders who will die first. He says the question sometimes arises in their conversation, reminding them of their lack of innocence. He tells Babette that Bee, his daughter from his previous marriage to Tweedy Browner, wants to visit at Christmas.

The family orders Chinese food that Friday night and watches television together, a rule of Babette's (she believes if the kids watch television with their parents, it will "de-glamorize" the activity). No one enjoys the time together. Jack obeys his own custom after TV night; reading about Hitler. He remembers how the college chancellor, in 1968, told Jack his name was not suitably powerful as the pioneer of Hitler studies. Jack added an initial and called himself "J. A. K. Gladney." Jack also followed the chancellor's advice of gaining bulk and ugliness, wearing dark glasses and a bushy beard.

Analysis:

Jack's identity is clearly in crisis. He fully admits that he is the "false character" that follows around his invented name. His fake initials -- J. A. K. -- echo those of President John F. Kennedy, whose status as a golden-boy icon often overshadows his true identity.

In the previous chapter, we learned the town's name is Blacksmith. This potentially holds a few meanings. First, it is a sturdy, working-class name that resounds of Middle America. Second, it alludes to the forging of material. The color of black has already been associated with Jack's robe, and black typically has identifications with death. "Smith" is also the most common surname, and suggests a kind of anonymity in the town. Perhaps Jack is trying to forge his own identity in the town of Blacksmith, running away from the death and anonymity that seem to cover everything.

The brief description of the Gladneys' television ritual is the first of many conventional family scenes that DeLillo ironizes. Unlike most families, who watch television together without any conscience, Babette forces them to watch in an effort to reduce television's power. However, the effect is the same; the family still watches mostly in silence, and it is uncomfortable for them all.

However, DeLillo is not over-the-top in his critique of television. It is still a bonding device, one that brings together the family, however failed. This may be the best way of analyzing DeLillo's view of consumerism in modern-day America. While he exposes its faults and the lurking "white noise" of death behind our technology and customs, he seemingly connects our habits to ancient traditions; gathering around the television is the new way of gathering around the fire, and while it may not be as productive or gratifying, at least we still gather together.

Chapter 5:

Babette reads the family members' horoscopes aloud. At night, Jack is jarred awake by the normal muscular contraction of myoclonic jerk, and wonders if death resembles its abrupt movement. He and Babette run into Murray at the supermarket; Murray buys only generic brands in white wrappers. As he sniffs Jack's cart, Murray tells them he's pleased with his seminar. When Babette wanders away, Murray says she must be great in family tragedies; Jack says she isn't, that she broke down when her mother's died and even when Steffie's broke her hand.

They drive Murray to his boarding house. Jack feels secure as a result of all the products he and Babette have bought. Murray makes something of a proposition to Babette. Jack relates Murray's strategy of seduction: earnest and vulnerable desire that does not include any kind of manipulative insincerity. Murray leaves.

Analysis:

Jack thinks death should be "white-winged and smooth," alluding to the white noise around him. Murray buys only generic brands, showing his contempt for traditional consumerism, but it is important to note that all the wrappers on his food are white. No matter what, death is inescapable; just as Americans read the tabloids and worship celebrities in an attempt to distract themselves from death, Murray's cultured rebellion is just another, albeit white-winged and smooth, way to deflect death.

Murray's seduction strategy is one steeped in irony. He says that in his natural approach, he does not allow himself to manipulate his image to seduce women -- tactics that are otherwise most natural to him. In other words, he has to work hard at being natural, an ironic and almost paradoxical mission. The key, however, is that he is like the photographers at the barn. Just as they are taking pictures of taking pictures, launching themselves into a simulation more real than reality, Murray has to act to appear natural, and this unnatural naturalism is somehow more real than plain naturalism. The idea may be confusing, but it's supposed to be; what we should remember is that simulations have replaced reality, even for someone like Murray who is aware of the replacement.

Chapter 6:

Heinrich's hair is receding, and Jack wonders if he is at fault for having raised his son near a chemical dump site. He drives Heinrich to school and debate the rain; Heinrich informs him that the radio said it was going to rain tonight, while Jack points out that it is already raining, and that they don't need to believe the radio over their own senses. Heinrich believes the senses can lie and that truth is relative, and refutes Jack's common-sense arguments in a number of ways. Jack watches him walk into school, feeling Heinrich attracts a sense of danger; for instance, he plays chess-by-mail with a convicted murderer.

Jack goes to his college's movie theater, where he will screen in the background footage of Nazi rallies and films for his class, Advanced Nazism, a study of the mass appeal of fascism through rallies, parades, and uniforms. The footage concentrates on crowd scenes. The college students enter the theater. After the showing, Jack lectures on "plots" -- political, narrative, etc. He says that all plots move "deathward," that death is the contract both the plotters and the targets of the plot sign. He wonders why he has said this, and what it means.

Analysis

The conversation between Jack and Heinrich is another subversion of traditional family relationships. While in most families the father and son may discuss sports or endure chilly silences, here the father and his son debate the objectivity of reality -- and, more hilariously, the moody, older-than-his-years (note the receding hairline) son bests his academic father on a number of rhetorical and imaginative levels.

The questions raised by Heinrich are valid. Do our senses falsely construct reality, much as Jack believes the media does? This wariness of media makes sense for Jack's character. He is attuned to the ways Hitler manipulated the media and popular judgment and managed to convince the masses they were in the right. Jack wants to believe that humans have an innate sense of reality, but Nazism disproves this; we are easily controlled by images and spectacle.

And we have not changed all that much since Nazi Germany. The students in Jack's class resemble a parody of a Nazi parade. They enter the theater in unison in their similarly-styled clothing, and they await the robed Jack's lecture with the same anticipation crowds had for Hitler's speeches.

Jack's statement that narrative plots move deathward is not a new idea; in Peter Brooks's Reading For the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Brooks also finds that death is the drive of all plots (as do many other thinkers, from Freud to Sartre). In a practical sense, we can say that narratives generally end when the plot ends so, in effect, the narrative dies with the end of the plot. Jack opens the field of plots up to everything, magnifying his belief that life is just a process of heading toward death. The scene also foreshadows the end of White Noise since, as a narrative, it must be moving deathward. The question, as Jack often wonders, is whose death will it be?

Chapter 7:

Jack describes Babette's twice-weekly lectures on good posture and mobility to an elderly audience in the town's Congregational church. He believes people think good grooming is a way to ward off death. At home, he and Babette fall into bed. They discuss what to do sexually; both are eager to defer their desires and please the other. They finally decide that Babette will read him erotic literature. Jack says that he and Babette tell each other everything, except about fear of death. He goes to Heinrich's room to find a pornographic magazine, as he wants Babette to read him the erotic letters, and Heinrich directs him downstairs. Jack finds old photo albums instead, and he and Babette pore over them for hours. Again, he wonders who will die first.

Analysis:

In another humorous subversion of typical family life, Heinrich directs his father to his stash of pornographic magazines. DeLillo's genius lies in his ability to combine seamlessly these ironic moments with rather intimate ones; Jack's exchange with Heinrich comes on the heels of an unsentimental, realistic portrayal of marital sexual frustrations. DeLillo's tone rarely deviates in White Noise, and it doesn't need to; it is already a combination of both ironic and sincere voices.

It makes sense that Jack and Babette have problems with sex. Sex, the creation of life, conventionally opposes death, and they are too obsessed with the end of life to engage in its beginnings. Instead, they put off sex to look over the old photographs, and these images of the past remind them that death is an inevitability, that time marches on despite our attempts to freeze the present.

Jack again brings up the idea of the simulation replacing reality. He points out that the publication of erotic letters may be more stimulating for their authors than the actual experiences. In the same way that the tourists reinforced the barn's aura by taking its picture, the deeper excitement for the letter-writers comes from seeing the letters in a national magazine, from being voyeuristically ravished by others; the letters are now the exploits of quasi-celebrities.

Chapter 8:

Jack reveals a major failing -- despite being the foremost authority of Hitler studies, he does not know German. He believes that Hitler's own difficulty with the "cruel" German language is the subtext of his autobiography (Mein Kampf). Jack's numerous attempts to learn German have failed, but he has begun secret lessons with a man named Dunlop who lives in Murray's boarding house. After the lesson, Jack invites Murray to dinner at his house. Murray accepts, and asks Jack why he's renewed his German lessons. Jack says the college will host a major Hitler conference in the spring.

At home, Denise puts a garbage bag in the kitchen compactor. Murray absorbs the hectic chorus of household appliances -- the dripping sink, the washing machine, etc. The family makes small talk, and Jack marvels at the subliminal connections the family makes together.

Analysis:

We see another instance of Jack's false identity; he can't speak German, and even seems incapable of it, but he surrounds himself with enough totems of authority -- the dark glasses, black robe -- that no one sees through him. He even deludes himself; he wants to believe that he and Hitler share a similar disability with German. In short, Jack continues the theme of constructing a simulated reality that replaces the objective reality.

Jack focuses on the "cruel" sound of German, on its "deathly power." As with other sounds in the novel, such as the "dreadful wrenching sound" of the kitchen compactor, the sounds of German herald death, albeit more overtly than the white noise of technology and modern culture. The family also communicates through this white noise -- Denise wordlessly connects Babette's running clothes and the garbage bag, and Jack wordlessly picks up on this mental connection. The constant background noise of the family's chatter is a more evident piece of this familial white noise. This theme will be developed more later, but already we can see their white noise focuses frequently on health and death -- they discuss the necessity of boiling water, of turning into a car's skid, and Babette always seems on the lookout for Wilder.

Chapter 9:

Jack says that the grade school had to be evacuated, as students were beset by a variety of health problems. No one knows what the cause is. Inspectors in Mylex suits swept the school to detect problems, but since Mylex is itself a dangerous material, they received ambiguous results. Jack takes the family to the supermarket, where they again run into Murray. Wilder grabs at items off the shelves, and Jack wonders why Wilder's vocabulary is so limited. Jack and Steffie wander off in to the fruit bins, where he listens to the noise of the supermarket. Steffie tells him that Denise reads the Physicians' Desk Reference to find out the side effects of Babette's medication. Jack asks her what medication this is, and Steffie tells him to ask Denise.

Murray tells Babette that the Tibetans believe in a transitional state between death and rebirth that recharges the soul, and he thinks the supermarket does this in their culture. Tibetans see death as the end of attachments to things, he says, which is a hard thing for people to do, since they want to deny death. He describes the depressing anonymity of death in American cities, while in towns people can at least identify you by trivial things, such as the car one drives.

Babette briefly loses Wilder, but they find him in a neighbor's cart. Murray invites the family to dinner next weekend. At the checkout line, Jack hears unidentifiable foreign languages. In the parking lot, they hear a rumor about one of the Mylex-suited inspector's dying while in the school.

Analysis:

Wilder is almost a symbol for the unthinking consumer; having a limited vocabulary to express himself, he grabs for items which he thinks will speak for him. (On a side note, Jack is much like Wilder, being unable to speak German but taking on objects such as his robe and dark glasses which will somehow speak for him, and this is probably part of his concern for Wilde's vocabulary.) The supermarket is the ideal place for this expansion of vocabulary. Stocking all varieties of exotic foods, it packs global meaning into a local space. Alongside the many foreign languages its inhabitants speak, the supermarket even has its own invented vocabulary -- "Kleenex Softique," for instance. This notion of a consumerist language will assume greater importance throughout the novel, but for now it is the noise of the supermarket, the "unlocatable roar," that reminds us of the white noise of death lurking beneath consumerism. Instead of detaching ourselves and accepting death, like the Tibetans, we try unsuccessfully to escape death by attaching ourselves to things, grabbing at them like Wilder. But we are in denial, and this is why the deathly sounds of the supermarket are "just outside the range of human apprehension"; we won't let ourselves listen to them.

There is great ambiguity in the novel's atmosphere of death -- no one knows what has caused the school's health problems, and the inspectors themselves may cause further problems with their Mylex suits. In this last part, we see another instance of simulation usurping reality. While the inspectors are not exactly a "simulation," they are secondary figures to the school; they are much like the tourists who visit the barn. And, like the tourists who add to the barn's aura of being photographed, the Mylex men add to the school's aura of irradiation (or whatever is wrong with the building).

Moreover, even if the rumor about the inspector's death isn't true, by speaking the rumor people reaffirm its reality. Again, the masses construct reality, as we have seen repeatedly through DeLillo's focus on media and Nazism.

The chapter contains two important instances of foreshadowing. The first is the revelation of Babette's medication, something that will play a major role in the plot. The second is when Wilder runs off. Babette is constantly worried about losing him, and this is the first case in which it actually happens.

Chapter 10:

In the kitchen, Denise and Steffie tell Babette not to chew sugarless gum, as its label warns of its carcinogenic qualities. Denise refers to Babette's failing memory, but quickly drops the discussion. Jack finds Heinrich strategizing chess moves in his room. Jack asks what he knows about his prison-partner, and Heinrich says he killed six people. After more prodding, Heinrich reveals more details about the murders, culminating in the murderer's regret that instead of killing strangers, he did not assassinate one famous person so he could become famous himself. Heinrich says his mother has invited him to visit her in the summer, but he's not sure what he wants -- as he finds it, there's so much activity in the brain that it's impossible to know what one truly wants.

Jack checks his balance at the ATM in the morning. He is pleased by his harmonious interaction with the computer system. At the same time, two armed guards escort a deranged person from the bank.

Analysis:

While the ATM is silent, Jack's operation of it is blanketed by metaphors and signifiers of noise -- he feels "waves of relief," the system is "disquieting," and he is in accord with the system's "harmonies." It hums with white noise, and the deranged person's escort by the armed guards reminds us that white noise, as always in the novel, points to death.

Death still lurks everywhere. Even something as seemingly harmless as gum is scrutinized for its ill effects. Again, only with some kind of sign -- the cancer warning on the package -- does the lethality of the gum take prominence in the minds of the characters. It is almost as if, for Denise, the sign is more dangerous than the chemicals. The gum debate also foreshadows another key ingredient in the plot, that of Babette's faulty memory. Since Denise brings it up, we can assume she is connecting Babette's memory with the medication that Babette supposedly takes.

Heinrich brings up the ambiguity of desire in his conversation with Jack, but he could just as easily be referring to the ambiguity of identity. Do we really define ourselves? We change constantly; who can say what our true identities are? The ambiguity of identity has become a cliché of postmodern fiction, but DeLillo seems to advocate embracing the ambiguity. In the world of White Noise, it seems only Heinrich is comfortable with ambiguity, and because of this he sees more deeply into people, acknowledging his prison chess-partner as a complex human being. Jack, on the other hand, denies ambiguity, trying to find his identity through Hitler studies. This denial on his part connects the ambiguity of identity to the ambiguity of death. Death, after all, is the greatest ambiguity of all, the unknown region beyond the narrative of our lives. Heinrich is Tibetan in this sense; just as they accept the inevitability of death, he accepts the ambiguity of life.

Chapter 11:

Jack wakes up in a "death sweat." He sees that it's 3:51 A.M., and wonders if death is odd-numbered. He sleeps, then wakes up in the morning to the smell of Steffie's burning toast (she savors the smell). He finds her in the kitchen with Babette, and reveals that he'll be 51 next week. They speak about Steffie's biological mother, Dana Breedlove, who works for the CIA, though they're not supposed to discuss it. When Steffie is busy with the phone, Jack tells Babette that Dana liked to "plot," embroiling people in sticky situations.

That night, Jack and Babette have dinner at Murray's. After dinner, they discuss Murray's apartment, the building across the street that looks like an insane asylum, and Babette's kids (she has another who lives in Australia). The talk turns to television, and Murray says he's been taking notes on television for the past few months. He has concluded that the "waves and radiation" of television have become a "primal force" in the home. He says he implores his skeptical students to root through television to find the mythological codes in its glitzy commercials.

On the walk home, Babette admits she forgets things, but didn't realize it was that noticeable. Jack suggests she is taking something. Babette says isn't, or at least she doesn't remember taking anything.

Analysis

Murray opens the discussion of television as the religious medium of America. He finds the glut of information in television a gold mine for mystical interpretation. This is another example of DeLillo's even-handed critique of television; while he acknowledges it is filled with so much commercialism, he understands that the commercialism contains sacred messages.

These messages come out as Jack chants brand names of material in his head, the first of many times this will happen in the novel. The names are of synthetic materials, and he most likely does it because Steffie said the name of one material into the phone earlier. The names are exotic-sounding, and they contribute to the idea that consumerism has its own mystical language; the names become a religious mantra, a prayer of sorts.

When Jack reveals that Dana liked to get him into plots, we are reminded of Jack's statement that all plots tend deathwards. Add this ominous idea to the odd-numbered, deathly time of 3:51 A.M. on Jack's clock and his upcoming 51st birthday, and we have ample reason to believe Jack is heading towards death somehow.

The plot also thickens regarding Babette's memory problem and possible use of medication. While she may be lying about possibly taking medication that destroys her memory (such that she wouldn't be able to remember taking the medication in the first place), the possibility arises that she is taking the medication to impair something -- we just don't know what yet.

Chapter 12:

Jack describes his awkward German lessons with Dunlop, who teaches a number of subjects. Among them is meteorology, which reassures him with its confident predictions of weather. At home, Jack finds Bob Pardee, Denise's father and a businessman, in the kitchen. Bob takes the kids out to dinner, and Jack drives Babette to Mr. Treadwell, the blind man to whom she reads tabloids. At his house, Babette says she can't find him, and the neighbors and police provide no help, either. They meet Bob and the kids at a donut shop. Jack watches Babette sympathetically size up her former marriage to Bob. The next day, the authorities search the river for Mr. Treadwell.

Analysis:

Dunlop finds something comforting in meteorology, especially because in teaching it he can in turn reassure others. They want to believe they have some control over their environment, that variations in weather is somehow coordinated with them. Although one usually knows as much as one needs to know about weather by looking out the window, Dunlop reminds us of Heinrich's discussion of rain. In that, Heinrich attributed greater merit to the radio's forecast than to his own sensations. It seems that only those who can claim special authority -- in this case, meteorologists -- fully understand their objective reality -- in this case, the weather. Again, we see Jack hungering for this special authority, this ability to construct reality, much as Hitler did so successfully through his propaganda and image-manipulation.

In what we may term DeLillo's vision of the postmodern family, Jack is usurped as the father, or at least as the primary father. Bob, who suits the traditional father figure much better -- he's a businessman, he plays golf -- is the one who takes the kids out to dinner, even the ones who aren't his biological children. Since almost all of Jack's and Babette's children are from former marriages (and two don't live with them), the status of parenthood is a diffuse one. This diffusion reflects contemporary times -- half of marriages end in divorce -- but also contributes to DeLillo's overall theme of ambiguous identity; families, where identity seems so rigidly defined, are shown as the most vulnerable and amorphous units.

The specter of death hangs over this chapter as well, in the form of Mr. Treadwell's disappearance. Combined with Wilder's getting lost in the supermarket, it seems that disappearance occupies the same vague territory as death; no one knows where the person is in each case.

Chapter 13:

Babette tells Jack the news that Mr. Treadwell and his sister were found in an abandoned cookie shack in a mall. No one knows how they got there. The previous day, the police had enlisted the aid of a psychic. Her tips led them to a gun and a supply of raw drugs. The psychic had previously led the police to a number of other intriguing finds, although each time the police had been looking for something else.

Analysis:

The Treadwells' adventure is almost a parody of a suburban outing; they go to a mall and end up its prisoners, surviving in a kiosk and scavenging for discarded food. More amusing in this short chapter is the discussion of the psychic. She, too, has a mystical power others do not understand, and it is all the more mystical because it is not completely accurate (she misleads the police, though they eventually do find something). As we have previously seen in other examples throughout the novel, the psychic can construct her own reality through this power. She surrounds herself with an undeniable aura, and even if what she predicts is not the "real" answer (it's not correct), but a "simulated" one (she manufactures a different answer), somehow it becomes more real -- the fact that she leads the police to a different crime is even more incredible.

Chapter 14:

Jack worries about his German for the spring conference. Denise interrupts him, saying she's worried about Babette's memory. She knows she's taking medication because she saw a prescribed bottle of a medicine called "Dylar" in the trash, but her drug reference book doesn't list Dylar. Denise asks him why he gave Heinrich his name. Jack says he wanted to give him an authoritative, German name. He and Steffie and Denise look through the German-English dictionary. Heinrich comes in and tells them there's footage of a plane crash on TV. That Friday night, the family attentively watches TV news of natural disasters. Each disaster makes them crave a bigger one.

On Monday, Jack finds Murray in his office. Murray is having problems securing his Elvis Presley studies, and Jack promises to visit his next lecture to lend him some validity. At lunch Jack sits at a table with Alfonse, the popular culture head. Jack asks him why people are intrigued by catastrophe on television. Alfonse believes that we need them to break up the constant flow of information, and that we enjoy them when they happen to other people, such as Californians. The other men in the popular culture department ask a series of personal trivia questions, such as where they were when James Dean died. They all have detailed answers, though one of them can't remember where he was.

Analysis:

DeLillo, as he frequently does, uses a character -- here, Alfonse -- as a mouthpiece for his ideas. Here, the idea that catastrophes break up the inundation of other information does not require further interpretation, but DeLillo shrewdly sets it against the professors' trivia contest. These men absorb, it seems, all information that has ever passed to them, so they don't require catastrophe in the same information-breaking way the rest of us. Therefore, it makes sense that one of them cannot remember a catastrophe -- James Dean's death -- while he could probably remember the times he's brushed his teeth with his finger.

While Jack claims that Heinrich wasn't named for anyone, Heinrich Himmler was a central figure in the Nazi's Third Reich, the head of the Gestapo (secret police). Although Jack's son obviously is more pacifist, his attraction to information, especially information from the media, accords with Himmler's, who trafficked heavily in secret information. Regardless of the allusion, Jack admits that he was trying to instill a sense of authority in his son, something Jack frequently attempts for himself.

The plot line picks up -- we now know that Babette is taking medicine, and that she either lied to Jack about it or it really is disrupting her memory.

Chapter 15:

Jack enters Murray's lecture. Murray discusses Elvis's mother, and then Jack makes a point about Hitler's mother. The men go back and forth, trading nuanced observations on Elvis's and Hitler's relationships with their mothers -- they both adored their mothers, couldn't bear to be apart from them, became severely depressed when their mothers died. Murray soon cedes the floor to Jack, who speaks at length about Hitler's relationship with crowds, one charged with eroticism. He argues that crowds are a way to keep out death, and that to break away from the crowd is to face death alone. A crowd gathers around Jack, and Murray escorts him out of the room.

Analysis:

This chapter is renowned for its humorous comparisons of Elvis and Hitler, but little is said about why, apart from comic value, DeLillo focuses on the men's mothers. Since mothers are associated with fertility, it seems fitting that Elvis and Hitler were obsessed with them, as they were men renowned either for their suicides (Elvis's by a drug overdose, Hitler's in a bunker) or for the ones they caused (only Hitler, obviously).

The more important feature of the chapter is the conflation of Hitler and Elvis, two towering popular culture figures, and the meanings that carries. If we look back on the discussion of catastrophe and information, Elvis can been seen as a representative of all the excessive information that filters our way, and Hitler is the catastrophe that rouses us and catches our attention. But in Jack and Murray's dialogue, Hitler is reduced to the level of Elvis, a mere pawn of historical trivia, while Elvis is enlarged to the level of Hitler, a maker of history.

Chapter 16:

Wilder cries incessantly all day, and nothing they do makes him stop. They take him to a doctor, but Jack stays in the car, as the negativity in a doctor's office depresses him and reminds him of his own death -- he would rather visit an emergency room, where the health problems have little to do with his own "eventual death, nonviolent, small-town." Babette comes back with the doctor's advice: an aspirin and bed, the same prescription Denise offered.

As Jack starts the car, Wilder's crying changes pitch to a more "mournful" quality. They debate taking him to the hospital, but instead Jack drives Babette to her class at church. As Jack sits with the wailing Wilder in the car, he gives in to the crying, letting it "wash over" him. He drives and lets Wilder steer. On the way home with Babette, the crying stops suddenly. At home, the others are careful not to provoke Wilder in any way, and watch him with awe.

Analysis

Wilder's crying is a more urgent, audible instance of the white noise that has been building up in the novel. A parent worries about nothing more than his child's health, and Wilder's crying sends Jack and Babette to the doctor. They are scared his crying foretells his death, but it is only through submitting to this that Jack can bear it. He gives in to Wilder's cries, which are described with words befitting water -- "wash," "rain," -- and specifically waves -- "fall and tumble." The sound waves are not so terrifying once he concedes their presence, and Jack is motivated to do another risky thing -- letting Wilder steer the car. By engaging in this dangerous practice, he is giving in to death slightly, admitting that it is inevitable someday. However, it seems unlikely that Jack will continue to embrace death as he does in this episode.

DeLillo continues the theme of the authoritative power of auras. Jack and Babette admit they didn't pay attention to Denise because she's a kid, even though she offered just as sound medical advice as the doctor. Again, they need the assurance of a sign, an aura of higher authority, and only then will they put their trust in others.

Chapter 17:

On the way to the mall, Denise asks Babette what she knows about Dylar. Babette asks if that's the name of a black girl they know, and this leads to a series of free-association factual errors, such as that Lagos is the capital of Dakar. Jack believes the "family is the cradle of the world's misinformation," and believes the need to survive "generates factual error." Murray believes facts threaten us, and that the strongest families live in the least developed societies. At the hardware store, Jack runs into Eric Massingale, a computer teacher at the college. Eric tells Jack that he looks "harmless" and "indistinct" without his collegiate uniform.

Jack goes on a spending spree in the mall. He feels closer to his family, and that he has "found new aspects of myself." He grows more benevolent, letting his kids pick out items for themselves. After a while, they drive home in silence, retiring to their rooms. He watches TV later with Steffie.

Analysis:

This chapter details in greatest length the family as a "cradle of misinformation"; we have previously seen rapid-fire banter, but never to this hilarious effect. The family creates its own sort of white noise, drowning in its own river of ill-formed facts, and perhaps Murray is right. Knowing the objective truth is frightening, since it means we also must acknowledge we will die. By denying factual truths, we can deny death.

We see further signs of Jack's ambiguous identity; without his collegiate apparel of the dark glasses and robe, Eric thinks he looks "indistinct." To remedy his lack of identity, he becomes a voracious consumer. It does make him feel like part of his family, and he believes he rediscovers himself through purchasing.

But DeLillo's critique of this consumerist identity is evident through his language. Jack's spending spree is associated with glossy textures and surfaces -- "Brightness settled around me," "Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in security rooms." To make up for his indistinct identity, Jack settles on a superficial, reflective one that projects an image of himself he would like to see. It is ultimately a media-saturated one, as the image of the family on TV monitors suggests. Furthermore, the experience does not bond the family. Even when Jack and Steffie watch TV together, she silently mouths the words along with the characters; she would still rather be on television than in the real world.

Chapter 18:

Jack says that since Blacksmith is not near a large city, it doesn't feel threatened by cities the way other small towns do. He drives to the airport outside of Iron City, a large, economically depressed town, to pick up his 12-year-old daughter Bee. Instead, he finds Tweedy Browner, her mother, who says that Bee is coming in later and they will spend some time together before Tweedy has to go to Boston. Bee is in Indonesia, as Tweedy's husband, Malcolm, is trying to kick-start a Communist revival. They drive through Iron City. Tweedy confesses that she thought Jack would love her forever, and Jack points out that she came away with the lion's share in their divorce. Jack discusses Heinrich's mother, Janet Savory, and how she involved him in financial schemes. Tweedy is frustrated by Malcolm's undercover job, as it obscures his identity and he doesn't reveal anything to her.

They return to the airport. Before Bee's flight is scheduled to arrive, other passengers file out, looking shaken and fatigued. Jack finds out from a passenger that the plane had lost power, making the passengers -- and what's worse, the pilots over the intercom -- believe they were going to crash. Another intercom message relayed one of the pilot's profound thoughts of death. The flight crew prepared everyone not for a crash but for a crash landing, since one can prepare for a crash landing. As the passenger tells Jack the story, more passengers crowd around, as if they were learning about it for the first time. Then, the man says, the power went back on in the plane, restoring people's sense of life.

Jack finds Bee, who asks where the media is; Jack informs her there is no media in Iron City. Bee is disappointed that they "went through all that for nothing." On the drive home, Tweedy ruminates on the importance of allowing children to travel alone on planes.

Analysis:

Though Jack says there is no media in Iron City, the people develop their own media in the form of the man who tells Jack the story. They crowd around him, endowing him with the aura of authority. They believe his words more than their own experience, his simulated retelling more than their real experience.

Additionally, as a crowd they perform another task, which is to ward off death. Jack brought up this idea in his lecture in Murray's class, and here we see it in action. After a terrifying ordeal, they bond together in safety. However, it is also clear that their status as a crowd did them little good on the fear-inducing plane ride.

The pilot on the intercom who says that the anticipation of death is "worse than we'd ever imagined" also succumbs to the inevitability of death. In his over-the-top speech (which destroys whatever modicum of realism DeLillo is trying to impart), he ends by declaring his love for someone named Lance. While it seems like he has accepted death, his opening himself to vulnerability exposes a breakdown of authority to the passengers, and they panic anew. Crowds only protect against death, then, when there is a central figure of authority, such as the man who tells Jack the story.

As we gather from Tweedy, Jack told her just about everything, as he does with Babette. He has a compulsion to reveal his whole personality to others, since he is so unsure of his own identity. He is afraid of being like Malcolm, a shadowy figure without any real identity.

Chapter 19:

Jack says the sophisticated Bee makes the family feel self-conscious, aware of their flaws. Bee discusses her mother's problems with Malcolm, Tweedy's own identity problems, and Babette's virtues. Jack feels Bee is implicitly inquiring into his own life. Jack later drives her to the airport, and on the way back visits an old, quiet cemetery. He reads the tombstones. He feels the dead have a presence, that people believe they watch over them. He makes a few advisory statements in the imperative voice, including "Do not advance the action according to a plan."

Analysis:

Jack's cryptic final remarks in the chapter remind us of his discussion of plots. He previously said that all plots move deathward, and here he makes three statements embracing aimlessness and chaos. The way to avoid death, he seems to be saying, is to be aimless in life.

But this is not totally true, as Bee's previous comments on her parents make clear. Malcolm is always embroiled in terrorist plots, and he has an exciting life, though his identity is muddied and he is always near death. Tweedy, on the other hand, has little to do in her life, no action and no plots, and she is unhappy.

We can read Jack's statements as ironic ones. We know that White Noise is heading toward some kind of plot conflict with Babette's medication, as she has deflected attention from it previously. Like it or not, life inevitably does contain plots, and we all move deathward. Jack can neither totally ignore plots (like Tweedy) nor totally embrace them (like Malcolm), as both options lead to indistinct identities.

Chapter 20:

Jack relates a series of deaths from the obituaries, including that of Mr. Treadwell's sister, who died from the "lingering dread" of her experience in the mall. He compares his age to the ages of the deceased. He thinks about Atilla the Hun, who died in his forties, and wants to believe that Atilla faced death bravely. Babette tells Jack that she wants to die first, as she'd be lonely without him. Jack says the same thing about himself.

Murray visits for his study of children, and he watches TV and talks with the kids. Jack and Heinrich argue about Babette's preference for coffee; Heinrich wants to start her on tea. Heinrich criticizes Jack for wasting motion in his preparations, and speaks about the importance of saving waste. Jack admits to himself that, in truth, he would choose loneliness over death, although he is frightened by loneliness as well.

Jack brings coffee in to Murray, and sees Babette's face on the TV. They are all shocked and confused. She seems alien to Jack. After a moment, they realize she is being interviewed in the church about her class. Wilder touches the screen. Denise tries to adjust the volume, but the sound gets distorted. After the interview ends, the girls excitedly go downstairs to wait for Babette, and Wilder cries softly by the TV. Murray takes notes.

Analysis:

Babette's appearance on TV is the first case of one of the family member's being projected as a simulated reproduction through the media. Understandably, they have a hard time recognizing her at first, especially Jack. He doesn't see her so much as the collection of pixels and light from the TV. Her voice is scrambled because it doesn't matter as much as her image; people are used to hearing someone who is not there (as over the phone, for instance), but they are not used to seeing someone who is not there. Wilder's crying states in bald terms the confusion and fear Jack also feels.

Heinrich's discussion of waste brings up a topic that interests DeLillo greatly, especially in his 1997 novel Underworld. Waste is a major postmodern topic, as it has grown considerably in the latter 20th-century. Heinrich associates waste with inefficient living, an argument that shuts up Jack, who would give anything to live longer. Waste itself is reminiscent of death; it is the discarded, the refused, the buried. In the consumerist culture, however, so much waste is accumulated. It is a vicious cycle -- the more we buy to stave off death, the more we surround ourselves with reminders of wasted death.

We see another instance of the consumerist mantra when Jack says the names of three credit cards. Why credit cards, specifically? For one, they're an all-purpose symbol of consumerism. But it seems especially telling that he names them after he discusses Babette's fear of loneliness and emptiness after Jack's death. Previously, we saw Jack's expenditures in the mall fill in his loneliness and empty identity; here, the credit cards alleviate Babette's fears of the same.

The Airborne Toxic Event

Chapter 21:

Jack comes home through the snow and sees Heinrich peering out from the attic window with binoculars. He comes in and tells Babette he's concerned for Heinrich's safety. She tells him to be gentle about it. He goes up to the attic. Heinrich tells him the radio reported that a tank car derailed, but from the heavy black cloud of smoke he sees, it looks like it got a hole punched in it. Jack tells him to shut the window. Heinrich listens to the sirens outside. An hour later, Jack goes up to the attic and looks through the binoculars again -- the black cloud is larger. Heinrich says the radio has defined the toxic chemical as Nyodene D, and first said it caused sweaty palms, then amended it to nausea and shortness of breath.

Babette says the girls are complaining of sweaty palms; Heinrich tells them there's been a correction, and they should be nauseated. Jack assures the family that they won't have to evacuate, and the "black billowing cloud," as the radio now refers to it, won't near their house. Babette is not so sure, but Jack says that natural disasters only occur in poor areas. Jack peers through Heinrich's binoculars again and watches as the many authorities deal with the cloud and pierced tank car. Heinrich tells him the chemical doesn't cause nausea and the associated symptoms, but heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu. He also says they're now calling it the "airborne toxic event." Jack argues that the cloud won't come their way, though Heinrich is skeptical.

The family eats an early dinner. They hear nearby air-raid sirens. When a new sound arrives, Heinrich opens the door and informs the family that the fire department is telling them to evacuate. They quickly pack some things and get in the car. The radio tells them that the west end of town is to head to an abandoned Boy Scout camp, while the east end of town is to go to a Chinese restaurant. They follow the herd of cars out of town, away from the amplified voice ordering people to evacuate. They pass policemen, an assuring sign that the authorities haven't fled, and people shopping out of town. They listen to the radio in a different town; people are being told to stay indoors.

They approach an overpass and see lines of people on foot carrying emergency gear. They pass the scene of a car accident; Heinrich watches it after they leave it behind, describing the scene in detail. He goes on to discuss the events of the evening, stimulated by the chaos. Jack thinks he sees Babette slip something in her mouth and swallow it. When he confronts her, she says it's a Life Saver. Though he doesn't believe, he decides it isn't the time to bring up her medication. They discuss the effects of Nyodene D, free-associating until they get to a discussion of taxonomy for rats.

They reach the scene of another car wreck, and a man in a Mylex suit directs traffic. Steffie feels like she's seen the scene before. Jack is worried she may have Nyodene D-inflicted déjà vu, but he remembers that the new symptoms of the chemical, as someone on the radio confirmed, are coma, convulsions, and miscarriage. He wonders if Steffie is being influenced by the radio, as she and Denise have been all night, or if the chemical really is affecting her. Heinrich warns them that they're running out of gas. They see an abandoned gas station, and Jack jumps out, shielding his head under his coat, and refills the tank. Back in the car, they see the black cloud lit up by the search beams of seven helicopters. It moves majestically, and Jack says their fear is almost "religious"; even though it is an artificial cloud, it feels like a natural disaster.

Near the Boy Scout camp, they see two school buses ferrying Blacksmith's mentally ill. It is comforting to Jack that the authorities are taking care of them. They pass a sign for the most photographed barn in America. They sit in the car as they enter the camp through heavy traffic. People stare at teach other through their windows. Finally, one family gets out of its car wearing life jackets.

Inside the barracks, various rumors and information issue from certain men, who collect crowds. People camp out in the barracks or in their cars. The sight of the Red Cross workers and nurses comforts the crowd. Jack moves among the small crowds and finds out there are nine evacuation centers total, and that the governor is supposedly flying to Blacksmith in a helicopter. When he reaches another crowd, he finds Heinrich lecturing the people on the chemical properties of Nyodene D. Jack leaves, not wanting Heinrich to see and him become self-conscious.

He returns to his family. Nearby, a father and son from a black family of Jeohvah's witnesses hand out tracts and proselytize. The wife talks to Babette, and mentions that the God Jehovah has an even bigger surprise in store. Jack and Babette discuss the possibility that Steffie has the symptoms of toxic exposure, and about Heinrich's new leadership role. Jack brings up his doubt over Babette's "Life Saver," and she insists it was true. The father of the Jehovah's witness family comes over and talks to Jack about the government's ineffectuality in the face of the impending apocalypse. He tells Jack people are either among the wicked or among the saved, and hands him a pamphlet about Armageddon.

Denise overhears a woman discussing exposure to toxic agents, and she tells Jack that he was exposed when he got out of the car to refill the gas. Jack joins a line, and soon tells personal information to a man who wears the word "SIMUVAC" on his jacket. The man tells Jack that his two-and-a-half minutes outside is dangerous. When Jack asks, the man tells him that "SIMUVAC" stands for "simulated evacuation," a new state program. Even though this is a real evacuation, the man tells him, they decided to use it as a model for the simulated evacuations. The man tells him that his computer has processed Jack's data, and his exposure to the chemical, combined with his whole profile, has resulted in a dangerous warning. He doesn't know how much longer Jack has to live, though he will know more in 15 years -- assuming Jack is still alive. He tells Jack not to worry about it, and to live his life. Jack longs for his academic costume.

Jack returns to his children, all of whom are sleeping but Heinrich. Babette reads tabloids to Treadwell and other blind people. Jack joins their group. She reads an article about proof, through hypnosis, of reincarnation. She relates several of the stories from the hypnotized, including one about a little girl who said she was the KGB assassin who killed Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Howard Hughes. The blind listeners are comforted. She reads the cover article about psychics' predictions for the coming year, most of which center around celebrities, famous assassins, space aliens, and political cults. Jack reflects that the evacuees have joined the "public stuff of media disaster." He returns to his children and watches them sleep. Heinrich is still up, and he discusses how despite their technological age, individuals are still as inept as Stone Agers.

After they talk, Jack goes outside, where a few groups of people stand around fires. He finds Murray talking to a carload of prostitutes. He stops talking to them and tells Murray he's worried about sexually-transmitted diseases. Jack confides to him about his exposure to Nyodene D. Murray philosophizes on death; he believes it "has a life independent of us." Then he expresses sympathy for Jack, and says computers frequently make mistakes. Murray pontificates on the reasons behind déjà vu, and says that the air of death is bringing it out. One of the prostitutes tells Murray she'll agree to something for $25; he asks her if she's checked it out with her pimp. Murray tells Jack he's asked her to let him do the Heimlich maneuver on her. He gets into the car, and Jack walks over to the burning fires.

He hears various rumors -- that the governor has died, that two men in Mylex suits have died, that there are more clouds. He observes that people are marveling not at the veracity of the tall tales, but at their ability to instill a sense of awe. He returns to the barracks and sits near his sleeping family. He listens to Steffie's unconscious mumblings, and hears the words "Toyota Celica." He watches his family a little longer, then sleeps next to Babette.

Jack awakens to the sound of the bullhorn. Everyone is packing and dressing and filing out. The voice from the bullhorn tells that there is a wind change, and the cloud is heading in their direction. The family goes outside, where it's now raining on the chaotic assembly of cars. The family follows another car through the underbrush. It starts to snow. The radio tells them to head to Iron City. They see the toxic cloud lit up by 18 helicopters; it appears it contains its own storms. Heinrich leads a discussion on how ignorant people are of their own anatomy. Jack keeps driving through the woods, and finally gets back on to the parkway and heads to Iron City. They meet up with the group from the Chinese restaurant, the cloud still visible behind them.

In Iron City, they end up in an abandoned karate studio. They are not allowed to leave. By noon, the rumor spreads that technicians are trying to plant microorganisms in the cloud to defeat it. Babette finds the idea of custom-made organisms worrisome. Steffie still refuses to take off her protective mask. At night, someone brings in a small TV and reveals its blank screen. He gives a fiery speech condemning the fact that they're hardly getting any media coverage despite all they've gone through. The crowd cheers. The man, near Jack, tells him he's seen this scene before, of Jack standing before him, looking "lost." Nine days later, everyone is allowed to return home.

Analysis

Jack refers to the cloud, lit by the helicopters, as a "sound-and-light show," and later as a moving advertisement, a "national promotion for death." It is as if a movie is playing before their eyes, and the whole evacuation is played out voyeuristically. Not only does everyone stare at the cloud, but they rubberneck at the two car accidents, they watch the people shopping, the pedestrians, and finally each other in their cars. This air of simulation, of it all being some kind of a movie, makes the artificially-created disaster seem more real than a truly natural disaster. Of course, the greatest irony is that the SIMUVAC people view this real event as practice for when they simulate evacuation; the simulation is somehow more important than the real disaster.

The voice of authority is given center stage in the evacuation. The radio accompanies the family from the tank car accident to the evacuation center, and there are loudspeakers and air-raid sirens in between. The girls follow the authority of the radio when they complain of their symptoms, trusting the voice of the media over their own sensations. Jack is also constantly assured when he sees signs that the authorities are doing their job, and not fleeing as well. In the same way, the blind listeners of the tabloids are reassured; mystics and psychics continue to make predictions or remember the past (the article about reincarnation), assuring that the future and past are still within our control; therefore, the present must be, as well. It is no wonder that Steffie mentions the name of a car in her sleep. The media mantra restores her faith in authority and gives off the aura of safety. Jack does the same thing by reciting the names of rust removers; he probably wishes he could just as easily remove the looming black cloud. As he explains to Babette, the "greater the scientific advance, the more primitive fear." In the face of this awesome technological disaster, they are all reduced to relying on mystical aids -- tabloids or consumer products. When the airborne toxic event doesn't rate media coverage, it is as if these mystics, the authorities, have abandoned them.

But Jack has also been told, with a fair amount of certainty from an authority figure, that his future is in jeopardy because of his exposure to Nyodene D. Even this form of death feels like a simulation to Jack, or a media projection, as he can see on the computer screen the signs of his looming death. The man's advice is to ignore the effects of Nyodene D, exactly what Jack has been trying to do all along in regards to death. But Jack has been unsuccessful at his denial, and the man tells him that there's no point in worrying about something one "can't see or feel." While he refers to the effects of the chemical, the same can be said about the gradual approach of death -- generally, one can't feel or see oneself dying (unless one is stricken with an illness). Instead of denying death, then, one can ignore it -- or, in an even more positive sense, embrace it and recognize that it will happen no matter what one does.

The anticipation of death grips everyone, though. The Jehovah's Witness father is pleased, since it validates his faith. Murray wants to do the Heimlich maneuver on the prostitute, possibly because it lets him feel like he can physically save someone in this time of crisis.

The exodus is a reversal of the opening scene. Instead of joyous college students returning to school in station wagons packed with expendable items, families fearfully evacuate their homes in cars or on foot packed with emergency gear. The other major reversal in the chapter is that after detailing all the white noise of death generally found in the modern home, DeLillo uses an external black cloud to symbolize the approach of death.

The distribution of the townspeople in the evacuation represents a greater geographical divide. The west end, symbolizing the Western hemisphere, goes to a symbol of America, a Boy Scout camp, where they receive aid in American staples -- Red Cross volunteers, juice, coffee. The east end, representing the Eastern hemisphere, goes to a Chinese restaurant. We are witnessing a kind of colonial movement, but one based on retreat, not imperialism. Heinrich's belief that we are as rudimentary as Stone Agers bears some validity when Jack goes outside; people huddle around fires and sleep in low-level conditions.

Dylarama:

Chapter 22:

In the supermarket, Jack watches the old people, who look lost. It's crowded because there's a forecast of snow. He sees Murray, who tells him that his rival in the college for teaching Elvis has drowned. They discuss the drowned man's huge size. Jack takes Wilder over to the fruit and reflects that he enjoys being with him, as he is instantly gratified by what he sees.

That night, Jack drives Babette to her class. They discuss the newly brilliant sunsets, which Babette believes are a product of the Nyodene D. At home, she tells him they want her to teach another class in eating and drinking. Jack resolves not to tell her about the dangers of his Nyodene D exposure. He nuzzles in between her breasts, drawing "courage" from her touch. He almost asks her to put on her legwarmers before they have sex, but doesn't.

Analysis

Babette spells out the continuing theme of how people need to be told by authority figures what to do (for the eating and drinking class), even if their "wisdom" just reinforces common sense.

Jack longs for Wilder's transient (if it's present at all) sense of mortality; he grabs sensually for objects, then quickly forgets them. Jack, on the other hand, can't get over the fact that Murray's rival, a man so physically big, has disappeared from the earth. People and things linger for him; death is eternally present.

Jack seems to be envious of Wilder in another way: Babette's maternal connection with him. Jack frequently calls Babette "Baba" (granted, so do the others), a self-admitted infantile sound. Here, he buries himself in her bosom, seeking a return to infantile nourishment (his own class in eating and drinking?). Even his near-request that she wear her legwarmers is a way for her to protect herself and for him, as her "baby," to derive increased protection from her.

Chapter 23:

Jack increases the length of his German lessons. He does well with writing and grammar rules, but he still has trouble with pronunciation, despite Dunlop's intimate observation (and, once, manipulation) of Jack's tongue. In the town, Mylex-suited men patrol with German shepherds. Heinrich believes there is still a great quantity of Nyodene D present in the town, though they are told there are only trace amounts. Babette points out that there are daily small toxic spills around the country, and that though they're serious, they're controllable. Heinrich says the real issue is the daily low-dosage radiation people encounter -- from microwaves, power lines, etc. He cites various evidence.

Babette changes the subject to general historical and educational questions, and the family drops the issue. Jack relates that a hotline has been set up in the area for people's sense of déjà vu. Jack feels that without a nearby large city, the small town has no one to blame for its fear of death.

Analysis:

Jack's difficulties with speaking German can be traced back to his feelings that the language is cruel and deathly. So much of Hitler's power was derived from his oratorical skills, his ability to work the crowd into a frenzy through his unique rhythms. Jack seemingly cannot bring himself to speak this language of death. It will remind him that he, too, is associated with death, that he, too, will die. Now he has even more proof; though he has no genocidal Hitler waiting for him, he has the toxic Nyodene D. Ironically, Jack doesn't mind the German shepherds, but he and everyone else fear the men in Mylex suits. They resemble Nazi storm troopers, anonymous in uniform and privy to some greater authority.

Babette believes that the small toxic spills are controllable but serious. In the same way, each day saps us of more life and brings us closer to death. She knows it's a serious matter, but it somehow seems more controllable. Is she being honest, or does she fear the toxic spills and the gradual approach to death more than she lets on here?

Chapter 24:

Jack discovers Babette's bottle of Dylar inside the bathroom radiator. He shows it to Denise. They decide not to say anything to Babette. Denise informs him that further research has yielded no clues as to what Dylar is. Calls to two doctors are fruitless. Jack sees Heinrich doing chin-ups; he says he's compensating for his receding hairline. Heinrich tells him that his friend Mercator is training to break the world endurance record for sitting in a cage of poisonous snakes. Jack and Heinrich agree that they usually want the person attempting such records to get bitten, as they're trying to cheat death. When Babette is standing by the window, and she doesn't seem to notice when Jack returns to bed.

Analysis:

Now Jack has proof that Babette was either lying about the Dylar or truly has memory lapses. That no authority figure knows what Dylar is can mean two things to Jack. One, if they don't know what it is, as higher authorities, then he may not have to worry about it. Two, the more likely and frightening possibility, it may be something beyond even their scope. Whatever Dylar is, its location inside the radiator somehow continues the theme of silent, deathly radiation surrounding us.

The discussion of Mercator is intriguing. Here is someone who is defying death, attacking it head-on. Is this the right way to go about death? Is sitting in cage full of poisonous snakes embracing death, as DeLillo has suggested may be the best way to deal with death, or is it an aggressive, arrogant defiance of it? Whatever the case, it seems that DeLillo has purposely juxtaposed the episodes of the Dylar discovery with Mercator's goal; perhaps the effects of Dylar are in some way the exact of opposite of Mercator's intended effects.

Chapter 25:

Jack takes a tablet of Dylar to a neurochemist at the college, Winnie Richards. She tells him to return in two days. At home, Jack tells Babette she seems different. He reveals that he found the Dylar, but she denies knowing what it is, and changes the subject. He revisits Winnie, who tells him that the Dylar is a "drug delivery system"; it gradually releases medicine through a small hole in the tablet. She doesn't know what the chemical components are or what it does, though. Jack insists she must know, since she's brilliant. She denies this, and says that all she knows is that Dylar interacts with some part of the brain, and that Dylar is not on the market. Jack tries to think of something funny, since Winnie blushes whenever she hears something funny.

Analysis:

While this is mostly a plot-oriented chapter about Dylar, DeLillo raises interesting points about scientific knowledge. Jack needs to believe that Winnie, a brilliant neurochemist, must know about Dylar. As an academic, he entrusts scientists with mystical knowledge the way Babette's blind reading group put their faith into tabloid psychics.

Winnie says that the infant's brain develops in response to stimuli, and that humans lead the world in stimuli. Jack's somewhat cruel desire to make her blush at the end of the chapter shows both the complexity of the human brain and of the stimuli surrounding it. Scientists still do not know why embarrassment causes blushing. Jack is upset that Winnie cannot answer him, so he will do something to her that she cannot explain scientifically and that hurts her in turn.

Chapter 26:

In bed, Jack orders Babette to tell him about Dylar. He tells her what he learned from Winnie. Babette tells him that about a year and a half ago, she developed a mental condition she thought would go away. She thought she'd be able to correct it, but when it wouldn't go away, she researched it through various sources without Jack's knowledge. Then, one day, while reading a tabloid to Treadwell, she saw an ad asking for volunteers for secret research. She calls the company Gray Research, though that's not it's real name, and calls her contact, a composite of several people, Mr. Gray. She was selected as one of the people to take the experimental drug Dylar. The potential side effects are dangerous. It could even ravage her brain so much that she would not be able to distinguish words from reality; "'if someone said Œspeeding bullet,' I would fall to the floor and take cover.'" The firm eventually decided it was too risky to let anyone try it, but Babette pushed. She and Mr. Gray -- the project manager -- made a private arrangement. In return for sex in a motel room, he would give her the drug.

Jack is hurt by this, and asks how long this went on for; she says several months. Babette cries. He asks her more about Mr. Gray. She says she won't talk about him for Jack's own good. Jack asks why Gray Research didn't test on animals. Babette says animals don't have this condition, that their brains aren't complex enough to fear what humans can. Jack has an idea of what the condition is, and makes her tell him. She says she's obsessively afraid to die. Jack tries to reason with, saying that everyone fears death, but she can't let it go. He finally confesses that he is obsessed with death, but he never told her to protect her. They compare the respective magnitudes of their fear, musing on what death is -- "'nothing but soundŠUniform, white.'" They hold each other and make love.

Jack asks what Gray Research accomplished. Babette says they isolated the sector of the brain that is fearful of death, and that Dylar relieves it. She says that everything in the brain is comprised of chemical impulses. Jack asks why Babette's been sad lately if the drug counters fear of death. She says Dylar isn't working, and there are only five pills left -- four, Jack reminds her, since she's forgotten about the one he had analyzed. Jack brings up her memory lapses. She says it's not a side effect of the drug, but of her condition; Mr. Gray told her it was an attempt on her part to deny her fear of death. Jack confides that to her about his forecasted death from Nyodene D. Babette cries, clawing and biting Jack. After she falls asleep, he looks inside the bathroom radiator: the bottle of Dylar is gone.

Analysis:

A great deal of exposition reveals Babette's lurking fear of death, one that has been hinted at all along -- her casual but probing discussion of death, her fear of losing Wilder. Other themes resurface -- that death is white noise, that the brain is nothing but a chemical stew out of our control. A new one comes up that will play an important role later: Dylar possibly separates words from objective meaning. In other words, a statement to someone on Dylar can seem like the real thing. One can construct reality based on language, much as we have seen the media in the novel construct an objective reality.

Jack makes the statement again that all plots move deathward, and White Noise, despite its profound subject matter and style, is shaping up, as Jack admits, into a conventional thriller: the hero's wife sexually betrays him with another man in a motel room for a favor. DeLillo even throws in an old-fashioned suspense twist at the end of the chapter when Jack discovers the Dylar is missing.

To add to this atmosphere of mystery, Mr. Gray is the epitome of ambiguity, of a film noir figure. He is a composite figure, given an appropriately shady name, and Babette even tells Jack that Gray is "not tall, short, young or old." She wants to keep him an ambiguous figure for Jack's emotional health, but doesn't realize that Jack, who wrestles enough with questions of his own identity, will drive himself crazy figuring out who Gray is.

Despite all the suspenseful tactics, the scene still plays out as a postmodern, identity-shifting scene of marital strife and reconciliation. The husband and wife have an argument over her infidelity, albeit one that is related to her consuming fear of death and a secret drug. They make up with sex. Then the husband confesses his own infidelity of sorts, his secret about his own fear of death her and his predicted demise from the Nyodene D. Finally, Babette assumes both a regressive infantile manner -- she bites Jack -- and an overtly maternal one -- she rocks his head back and forth on the pillow.

Chapter 27:

Jack has a medical checkup which reveals nothing about his impending death. On the way back to the supermarket, he runs into SIMUVAC-in-progress -- a simulated evacuation, complete with emergency vehicles and volunteer victims. An authority figure tells him to leave. Jack parks his car elsewhere, then walks back and approaches the "victims." He finds Steffie among them, and feels bad that she already sees herself as a victim. He listens to a man from "Advanced Disaster Management," the consulting firm that runs the simulated evacuations. The man gives detailed instructions for the evacuation, which he says is the only way to prepare for a real emergency. Jack decides not to watch.

As he arrives home, he hears the start of the evacuation, prompted by siren blasts. He sees Heinrich, dressed in military gear, who informs Jack he is a "street captain." With him is Orest Mercator. Jack asks him why he wants to sit in a cage of poisonous snakes. Orest says he wants to be the best at what he does. They debate the possibility of death; Orest doesn't think he will die, and Jack tells him he will. Jack goes inside and discusses with Babette how Wilder cheers them up. He asks her where the Dylar is, and she says she didn't move them. She suggests he wants to take them, and he promises he doesn't. He wants to know who Mr. Gray is, and she says she promised not to reveal his identity to anyone.

Jack picks Denise up at school (for the first time ever), and tells her the Dylar is to improve Babette's memory. She says he's lying. Jack says he knows Denise took the tablets from the radiator. She says she'll only return it when she finds out what Dylar does. He won't tell her, and she vows to throw out the bottle. A series of arguments from Jack and Babette don't work on Denise. Jack fantasizes about the effects of Dylar on him, countering the fear imposed by Nyodene D.

Analysis:

As we saw earlier, the SIMUVAC people in the Airborne Toxic Event illogically viewed the real evacuation as a simulation. What were they preparing for, then? Another simulation, it seems here; as the man from the Advanced Disaster Management says, "We learned a lot during the night of the billowing cloud. But there is no substitute for a planned simulation." While he is speaking about learning the proper techniques to combat a disaster, he may as well be exalting the uniqueness and value of simulation over reality.

Orest's skin is described as an "uncertain pigmentation." Jack later admits he has no idea what race Orest is, and that "It was getting hard to know what you couldn't say to people." Throughout White Noise, much of the ambiguity of the postmodern world is derived from racial uncertainty, and DeLillo details the attendant insecurity regarding these racial ambiguities. Jack is careful using certain words or phrases -- he says Dunlop's tone is what he wants to call "flesh-colored," or that Babette's hair is what used to be called "dirty blond" (a classification of which a professor of Hitler -- who believed blonde Aryans were pure -- would be particular aware). At the supermarket, he is bewildered by the fusion of races and languages. Orest is the paragon of racial uncertainty. His last name alludes directly to a Mercator map projection, a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world. In the same way, Jack can only identify Orest's ethnicity in flat terms -- by the language of names, colors, religions. He does not have a full idea of Orest's probable heterogeneous background; Orest stands as the universal "Other" for Jack, a figure of pure difference.

Moreover, Orest may take his first name from Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who avenged his father's death by killing his mother and her lover. The Classical allusion repositions Orest as a mythological origin who blends both Greek myth and Biblical allusions (by returning to Eden and confronting the serpent) with his indeterminate lineage. That Orestes avenged his father's death reminds us that Orest's father is an unknown progenitor, hailing from seemingly every continent; it is as if Orest is orphaned and has no idea who his parents are. By squaring off against a slippery, serpentine death, Orest tries to slay his indeterminacy, an equation DeLillo writes throughout White Noise. But Orest accepts his death, as Eastern religions do, observing that "'They want to bite, they biteŠAt least I go right away.'" What is clear is that Orest is in opposition to Jack. Both may have muddled identities, but Orest seems more accepting of his and is willing to confront death to discover it. Jack wants to deny death and believes that will reveal his living self.

Chapter 28:

In the kitchen, Jack asks Steffie how the evacuation went. She said most people didn't show up, and the victims just waited. She tells him that her mother (Dana Breedlove) wants her to visit her in Mexico City over Easter, but that she has signed up to be a victim again around Easter and doesn't think she can go. Jack tells her she can be excused from the evacuation.

Jack relates his relationship with Dana. His first and fourth marriages were to her. She was a reviewer of fiction for the CIA, investigating coded structures. Jack finds it curious that he keeps marrying spies: other than Dana, Tweedy's family were longstanding spies, and Tweedy is now married to a spy, and Janet Savory, Heinrich's mother, used to do research for a secret group of theorists.

At the college cafeteria, the popular culture department discusses personal trivia; many of the questions center around death, such as if they ever took pleasure as a kid in "imagining yourself dead." One of them says he does it more now, imagining his friends at his funeral feeling sorry they weren't nicer to him, and calls it the "most satisfying form of childish self-pity." Alfonse discusses how internal medicine is the "magic brew," that internists have the real power in the world.

Jack leaves and waits outside for Murray. He asks him how he can handle discussing death all day, and Murray says even when he was a sportswriter, the other writers discussed only sex and death. Jack doesn't want to believe that the two are linked. He asks how Murray's car crash seminar is going. Murray says his students view car crashes in movies as the "suicide wish of technology," but that he urges them to view the crashes as American optimism, as spectacular, technological one-upmanship. He believes we should look past the violence and to the innocent celebration of these crashes.

Analysis:

Jack's marriages, as he says, are to a string of spies or intelligence-related women, and even Babette now has a secret world with Dylar that blocks out Jack. It is a great irony that he, who seeks knowledge specifically about the unknown of death, is married to those who have this mysterious knowledge but cannot share it with him. Jack feels he is trapped within huge systems, the sources of all the white noise around him, and these systems withhold important information that keep them out of his grasp. A good example frequently brought up in the novel is science; as Alfonse professes, internists are nearly magicians, wielding power over invisible parts of our bodies. No wonder Jack views Mr. Gray as "hazy, unfinished. The man was literally gray." He thinks, as does Grappa the popular culturist, that everyone is against him, that they "scheme in silence" against him.

Jack brings up another irony in the novel when he discusses Murray's department. Jack finds the excessive discussion of death too much to handle. By now, it should be obvious that many characters in the novel besides Jack, especially Murray, the other pop-culturists, and Heinrich, are mouthpieces for DeLillo's ideas (even ones with which he doesn't necessarily agree). White Noise is a novel of ideas, and in the same way that Jack finds the intellectualization of death stifling, many readers find DeLillo's characters' ideas too cold and abstract. But this is just a personal preference and should not enter into a critical assessment of the novel; the more intriguing idea is that White Noise itself resembles the large, chaotic systems that intimidate Jack. The novel brims with ideas, both intrinsic to the work and baldly stated, and it is up to the reader to make the connections, to figure out the "system."

Chapter 29:

Shopping in the supermarket, Jack and Babette discuss his health. She buys some tabloids for Mr. Treadwell, and they read them together. On the ride home, Jack says the only health problem is his eyes -- he's seeing colored spots again. She tells him not to wear his dark glasses, but he insists he needs them to teach Hitler.

Jack briefly relates some events of his life. At his German lesson, he sees a German-language best-selling book called The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Jack starts throwing things away at home. Jack watches a continuing new story about two dead bodies buried in someone's backyard, though an intensive search yields no more bodies. Everyone, including the news reporter and Heinrich and Jack, is disappointed.

Analysis

Jack seems to be preparing for his battle against death. People often give their personal effects away before death, but he throws things out. He seems to be saying that his objects may die in the garbage, but he won't. He is intrigued by The Egyptian Book of the Dead, possibly since Egyptians are well-known for preserving the dead through mummification.

The rest of us, however, are simply buried in the ground, as the new story demonstrates, left to rot with the worms. Moreover, the news that there are not more dead bodies, that it does not constitute a grand catastrophe, disappoints everyone, especially Jack (despite his best attempts not to be disappointed). They want to believe that death is a mystical process with ties back to the Egyptians, but more often it is just a fact of life.

It is surprising, then, that Jack is willing in some ways to forsake his health for his identity. He won't trade in his dark glasses to improve his worsening vision, since he hangs so desperately to his academic identity. But perhaps the glasses are not merely for the effect they have on others. Since the glasses are dark, we can surmise that Jack is trying to see the world through deathly darkness; he wants to see it the way Hitler might have seen it. Instead, he sees colored spots. Are these visual manifestations of the deathly white noise around him?

Chapter 30:

Unable to sleep, and relentlessly thinking, Jack wakes up Babette in the middle of the night. He wants to talk to Mr. Gray. She refuses, since she believes he wants to ingest Dylar, and possibly kill Mr. Gray. He denies the accusations, saying he wants only to see if he qualifies for Dylan and that he's over their sexual trysts. She says she won't allow Jack to make the same mistake with Dylar she made.

Jack follows Winnie Richards the next day, running after her around the campus. Finally, she stops atop a hill, an awesome "postmodern sunset" dominating the view. Jack tells her what he's learned about Dylar, and asks if she knows anything about the group that manufactures it. She doesn't, and believes we need to fear death, as it gives life a "'boundary'"; fear lets humans "'rediscover'" themselves. He asks her how to make death less strange to him. She has no suggestions, but tells him to forget about Dylar and to continue with his life. He recognizes her advice as correct, but harshly tells her she has made him very sad. She blushes and they walk down the hill.

Analysis:

Winnie makes the important statement that one discovers oneself through fear, especially the fear of death. Throughout the novel, Jack fears death has been making him lose his identity. However, his consuming fear has actually sparked his reassessment of his identity; he thinks about people and objects and events in novel ways. The major problem is that he won't accept the idea that death makes life finite and comprehensible; instead, he fixates on the mysterious ambiguities of death. This unknown region is responsible for Jack's identity crisis.

If Jack could find a way, as Winnie has suggested, of focusing on life -- common-sense advice -- he might not have his identity crisis. But his cruel rebuttal of Winnie shows that he is not ready for this course of action. He believes he can only comprehend his life through understanding death.

As the sunset in this chapter indicates, that may not be possible. The colored spots Jack reveled seeing in the previous chapter seem to have morphed into the huge "postmodern sunset." Winnie speaks about the need for death's finality, for the limits it imposes. Here, we see a seemingly infinite sunset that defies limits. While it is beautiful, Jack admits that there is no point in fully describing it, and that there have been more dramatic and meaningful sunsets. Its ambiguity is so immense, it loses any sense of significance. We may say it is a deathless, infinite sunset, lacking the mysterious beauty of contained, regular sunsets. In the same way, Jack wants to believe his life is deathless and infinite, but this belief would prohibit him from gaining any meaning in his life, just as he cannot fully appreciate the beauty of the sunset.

Chapter 31:

Jack transcribes the 12-part instructions on sending payment to his cable company. He describes a night out to dinner; they order drive-thru chicken and eat in the car. They discuss outer space with misinformed facts.

Jack relates that earlier in the week, a policeman claimed he spotted a body thrown from a UFO. Later that night, a dead body was found dead of multiple fractures and heart failure. Under hypnosis, the policeman gave a detailed account of what he had seen, as well as of a psychic message he had received. Other sightings have sprung up in the area.

The family eats their brownies in the car. Jack describes the family growing awareness of the outer world, and how it makes them want to return home. On the ride home, Jack senses that his children will attack him and Babette in their restlessness. To avoid this, Babette steers the discussion back to UFOs.

At home, Jack receives a postcard from his oldest child, Mary Alice (since Dana Breedlove is her mother, she is Steffie's full sister, though they are technically from different marriages -- Jack's first and his fourth). Babette tells Jack she wishes he hadn't told her about his condition, since the two things she wants most in the world are for her to die first, and for Wilder to stay the same forever.

Analysis:

DeLillo delves into the various systems seemingly beyond human control. The cable bill is a parody of the specialized instructions required to make a simple monetary transaction. The family eats at a place specializing in "chicken parts and brownies," an odd combination that even has an interior level of specialization ("chicken parts," not just chickens). The family becomes aware of the world outside themselves while they eat; the simple pleasures of food turn into the complex, frustrating network around them. It seems they rebel from the inexplicable world through their incorrect facts; they would rather believe their own half-baked theories than admit that the world is beyond their knowledge.

And, of course, the alien-sightings are the greatest example of a mysterious system beyond human knowledge. To counter this ignorance, people claim they have seen them, been abducted, received psychic messages. They want to believe they are privy to this extra-terrestrial life-form so that, somehow, the regular world seems less bewildering to them.

Babette, on the other hand, wants the world, and her current system, to stay the same; she does not look forward to discovering new systems. While she fears death, a system she truly doesn't know, she also does not want to have to adjust to life without Jack, to the loneliness that entails. Moreover, she prefers Wilder to stay the same -- in other words, to continue not talking. She would rather his current system, his non-linguistic way of interacting with the world, remain out of her domain. As of now, he seems almost magical to her, but if he learned language, he would become a normal human, using language to symbolize his thoughts and feelings.

Chapter 32:

Jack and Murray walk across campus. They discuss Jack's misgivings about Dunlop, his German tutor. Murray brings up a number of Dunlop's characteristics -- his soft skin and the dry spit around his mouth, for example -- which Jack agrees are at the root of his uneasiness. Jack still feels there is something else about Dunlop that unnerves him. A few days later, Murray reveals it: "'He looks like a man who finds dead bodies erotic.'"

Jack goes to one final German lesson, but finds it unbearable now that Dunlop has a fixed, "diseased" identity. Jack admits he will miss the lessons, as well as the German shepherds which have now disappeared, though the Mylex-suited men still investigate the town for toxic residue.

Jack takes Heinrich to watch as the insane asylum burns down. Other fathers and sons are there, too. They see an insane woman in a burning white nightgown walk across the lawn. They watch the firemen battle the flames from her nightgown and from the building. Murray comes out from his nearby boarding house then quickly disappears. The acrid smell of burning artificial substances disperses the crowd and makes them "feel betrayed," as if they have become aware that death is both real and synthetic. They now think not only of the victims of the fire, but also of themselves.

At home, Jack and Heinrich drink warm milk. At night, Jack stays up thinking about Mr. Gray. He envisions his seduction of Babette through Mr. Gray's eyes, but his images continue to be hazy, though the sounds are clear to him. He ends relating this with the word "Panasonic."

Analysis:

This chapter details Jack's increasing discomfort with the idea of death. That Dunlop might find dead bodies erotic frightens Jack, who previously told Murray he hoped sex and death were not linked. However, they must be linked in Jack's mind, and not only because of the traditional concept of sex (creation of life) and death (end of life) as opposites: Babette's attempts to ward off the fear of death involved sexual acts. Understandably, Jack has trouble imagining their trysts, both because Mr. Gray is an ambiguous figure to him, but also because he cannot combine images of sex and death.

The burning asylum adds a new sensory quality to death. While the asylum was always a reminder of deathly white noise as a place where minds died, its burning scent infects the bystanders. Now they must confront the death of others; they can smell the white noise. They even see a virtual ghost, the woman in the white nightgown.

Jack's last word in the chapter, "Panasonic," was DeLillo's original title for White Noise. Panasonic, the name of a large Japanese technological company, literally means "all-sound." It is the omnipresent white noise of death Jack fears, whose volume intensifies as the novel reaches its climax. No wonder that Jack, unable to see clearly the meetings of Mr. Gray and Babette, can hear them so accurately.

Chapter 33:

Jack wakes up and finds Wilder staring at him. Wilder leads him to the window on the backyard, where they see a white-haired man sitting in an armchair. Wilder retreats to his bedroom. Jack is scared, thinking the man is Death itself, come to take him. Jack hides in the bathroom for a while and plans how to keep Death out of the house. He takes his copy of Mein Kampf outside, and the man turns in Jack's direction. As he comes closer, Jack realizes it's Vernon Dickey, his father-in-law. They make some small talk and go inside.

They discuss Vernon's moonlighting work as a handyman. Jack feels insecure about not knowing how to fix things. Vernon talks about a woman who wants to marry him and about sexual liberation for women in the home. Jack thinks that Vernon is shrewd, especially in the way he flirts with women. Babette comes in and is shocked to see her father. They all have breakfast. Jack observes that Babette regresses into a childhood state with her father. Vernon hangs around for several days. One day he asks Jack if people were "'this dumb before television.'"

One night, Jack goes into Denise's room and roots around for the Dylar bottle. She wakes up and says she knows what he's looking for; he says he needs the Dylar to solve a personal problem. After she refuses to give them to him, he eventually tells her about the medicinal properties of Dylar, though he leaves out his exposure to Nyodene D and Babette's trysts with Mr. Gray. Denise tells him that she threw out the Dylar a week ago, fearing Babette would find it. Jack says he's grateful to her, kisses her, and goes into the kitchen.

Vernon smokes at the kitchen table. He brings Jack out to the car and gives him a handgun. Jack doesn't want it, but Vernon is persistent, speaking about the dangers against which Jack can defend himself, and Jack relents. The next day, Vernon leaves, and Babette cries at his departure. He tells them not to worry about his various physical ailments and lack of money, but he tells them to worry about his awful car.

Analysis:

Jack's further anxiety over his ignorance of different systems -- here, it emerges that he is helpless at home repair, and wishes he could fix things as Vernon can. He seems to envy Vernon's systematic approaches to life -- his "Sets of special methods." Vernon does seem to have everything figured out, and what's more important, he clearly does not fear his impending death. His body is failing, his life is in disarray, but in Vernon's long speech at the end, he manages to see the bright side of every flaw.

What does Vernon fear, then? He carries a gun, and makes Jack take one. He fears someone else's taking his life, but not his own gradual approach to mortality. This may be why he jokingly tells Babette to worry about his car; if anything, it will kill Vernon before he kills himself. Despite his risky behavior -- his initials, V.D., even recall venereal disease -- it does not seem that Vernon will cause his own death.

Jack now has an instrument of death in the gun. He feels it is a measure of one's "competence" in life, as it gives him access to that world of Vernon's he aspires to -- one of confidence, of know-how, of knowledge of systems. Additionally, the gun seems like an important foreshadowing. The well-known axiom about dramatic foreshadowing -- if you show a gun on a mantle in the first act, it must be fired by the third act -- is utilized here explicitly, and continue's White Noise's deathward plot drive.

Chapter 34:

Jack and Murray continue their habit of walking and trading ideas. They discuss nostalgia in relation to German architecture. Ten days after Denise threw out the Dylar, Jack roots through the garbage. He feels like he is spying on his own house, as if the garbage conceals great secrets. Though he finds a number of intriguing items, including shredded underpants with lipstick markings, he cannot locate the Dylar.

Jack has another checkup. His doctor tells him his potassium is very high, but won't tell him what that means. Jack asks if it's possibly due to exposure to some substance; when his doctor asks if he has been exposed, Jack says no. His doctor refers him to a medical center in a nearby town. At home, Jack throws out a great number of things. He puts them in boxes and brings them out to the sidewalk.

Analysis:

Again, we see the garbage as a reservoir of consumer death. Everything is fused together, a mangled mass from far-flung reaches of consumerism. In particular, there is a curious mixture of gender-typed objects; first, the crayon drawing of a figure with female breasts and male genitalia; then the banana skin (phallic symbol) and tampon; then the male underpants with lipstick marks.

Perhaps garbage is the American consumer's version of reincarnation; everything mixes together, grafting on to other "lives." But Americans don't recycle -- they just throw things away. Their version of reincarnation is ultimately just a hellish afterlife, promising nothing fruitful to come. Jack throws things out in response to fears of his own death, as he did in Chapter 29 when he saw Dunlop's The Egyptian Book of the Dead. But he wants only to eliminate waste, to make other things die before he does. He does not embrace death like Eastern religions, but runs from it.

Chapter 35:

Babette continues her addiction to talk radio, and wears her sweatsuit constantly. When Jack asks her how she feels, she tells him Wilder helps her feel better. Denise frets over Babette, making sure she's amply protected against the sun.

Jack takes Heinrich and Orest out to an Italian dinner. They discuss Orest's training for sitting in the cage of snakes (he now has a personal trainer). He asks Orest if he's worried; the only thing Orest's worried about is if he's not allowed to go through with the challenge. He asks if Orest fears death; Orest says he doesn't. Jack is fascinated by the directed way Orest eats. Jack brings up the sliminess and bite of snakes, but Orest still isn't fazed.

At home, Jack tells Babette that Denise threw out the pills. Babette says she hopes this is the end of Jack's fixation on Mr. Gray, as she will never help Jack locate him. Jack helps Steffie pack for her trip to visit her mother in Mexico City. Steffie asks what he would do if her mother kidnapped her; Jack assures her he would go to Mexico to retrieve her.

The next day, a simulated evacuation takes place for noxious odor. Three days later, a real noxious odor drifts over the town. There is no official action; if anything, people are more polite. After a few hours, the vapor disappears.

Analysis:

Orest is assuming more of a god-like persona. He now has a spiritual trainer, and people are, according to Heinrich, starting to "believe him now." He is attempting the closest thing to a religious miracle now, one made all the more symbolic since he is battling snakes. As Jack points out, snakes occupy an especially fearful part of the human subconscious, let alone their Biblical allusions to the Garden of Eden.

We again see a simulated emergency take precedence over a real one. Throughout the novel, and in this chapter, characters are constantly getting worked up over simulated events in place of real ones. Mr. Gray, although a real figure, torments Jack more as a figure of his imagination, a hazy nightmare. Even Steffie agonizes over the absurd possibility of her mother's kidnapping her, not over something like a plane malfunction or getting lost in the airport. Even Orest misplaces his fears (though it is necessary for his goal); he doesn't fear the snakes so much as the Humane Society, which may block his project -- in other words, he's scared his dream won't become a reality.

Chapter 36:

Jack says he sometimes thinks of his gun, hidden in the bedroom. The weather is getting warmer. One night, Jack gets a collect call from Janet Savory, Heinrich's mother, who now lives on an ashram (a secluded Hindu community). She wants Heinrich to visit her in Montana. Jack will allow him if he wants to, so long as he doesn't get entangled in her religion. After he hangs up, he wonders if the swami of the ashram would be able to answer Heinrich's questions better than he can. At night, he finds a sweatsuited Babette staring out the bedroom window.

The Hitler conference begins at the college. Jack makes the brief opening address from his German notes, speaking mostly about Hitler's mother, brother, and dog. He avoids the Germans in the crowd. He thinks about his gun and the sense of secrecy and power it gives him.

Steffie returns from Mexico, exuberant. She says Dana told her she was thinking of stopping her government work. Jack goes to take further medical tests at the place his doctor recommended. He gives them various bodily samples, answers questions, and takes a battery of tests. A doctor asks him a few more questions, and Jack answers with healthy-seeming responses, hoping it will add years to his life expectancy. The doctor tells Jack he has traces of Nyodene D in his bloodstream; Jack says he's never heard of it. The doctors tells him Nyodene D can lead to a nebulous mass -- a growth without a definite shape -- which can cause death. The doctor gives Jack a sealed envelope which he should show to his doctor.

Jack walks through town at night. He imagines a phone conversation between a grandson and his grandparents. Jack repeats the doctor's last line, regarding the envelope Jack should give to his normal doctor: "Your doctor knows the symbols."

Analysis

It makes sense that Nyodene D can cause a nebulous mass -- a growth with "no definite shape, form or limits." Ambiguity is Jack's constant battle -- Mr. Gray, his own death -- and he specifically wishes his life to be limitless, to have no defined shape (remember what Winnie said about death creating a limit for life).

Jack again is made insecure by a former wife's access to a different system. Those on Janet's ashram have bonded together so that, even in their last life cycle (as Janet tells it), they can ward off death while being in a group. Moreover, Jack is worried that the swami knows more about the mystical world than he does, and will prove a better father figure to Heinrich.

But Jack's greatest insecurity is in the special, secret language of science -- "Your doctor knows the symbols." Only these mystics can understand each other, and Jack is not even allowed to look at his own envelope. They have an aura of authority he cannot pierce. Jack's imagined conversation between the grandson and the grandparents sheds some light on his feelings of inadequacy and death. He most likely identifies more with the old grandparents, obsolete and near their end, than with the young grandson, excitedly starting his life.

Chapter 37:

Jack and Murray go on a long walk one afternoon. Jack asks why humans can't be intelligent about death. Murray believes it's impossible to get beyond our basic fear. Jack wonders if the fear of death is what makes us die. He says he's slated to die from the Nyodene D, and says he does not regret anything in his life -- he only fears death. Murray tells him that, as a dying person, Jack will seem important to people, and he should not fall into despair. Murray asks Jack a series of questions about death, and Murray agrees with most of Jack's answers. Murray says Jack can put his faith in technology to revive his body. Jack doesn't want to do that. Murray says he can study the afterlife and take solace from the idea of its existence.

Murray believes Jack has studied Hitler because he is a "mythic figureŠlarger than death," and he hoped Hitler would help him deal with his fear of death. They go into the supermarket. Murray says Jack's problem is he doesn't know how to repress his fear, and that some people can't help this. Murray tells Jack he likes being around Wilder because Wilder doesn't know he's going to die. Murray tells him the final solution to approaching death. He says there are two kinds of people, killers and "diers." Most people are "diers," but the killers, by ending someone's life, somehow gain a "life-credit." Murray says it's only a theory, but Jack should think about it. Jack says every plot is to die; Murray says "'To plot is to live.'" He believes plotting is an attempt to affirm and control life.

Though Jack says he is "dier," not a killer, Murray reminds him of the "'reservoir of potential violence'" in males. Murray asks Jack who his doctor is, as he needs to see someone. Jack says he's afraid to see his doctor, and has hidden his medical printout in his dresser. Murray tells Jack the truth: "'Better you than me.'" He says it's a universal feeling about death. Jack tells him Babette wants to die first, but Murray is skeptical.

At home, Jack savagely throws away more things, feeling they have put him in this "fix." He transcribes the instructions for devising a secret code for an ATM card, and the multiple warnings about knowing your own code.

Analysis:

Jack brings up the possibility that "If we could learn not to be afraid, we could live forever." Previously, he has noted that humans are the only animals smart enough to know they will eventually die. But can Jack be right -- could we train ourselves to ignore the fear of death, thus staving off death? As Murray says, "We talk ourselves into it." We have seen other instances of people talking themselves into things -- the supposed symptoms associated with Nyodene D, for instance, that everyone got only when the radio discussed them. What Jack is searching for is the aura of fearlessness that Dylar would give him, an aura he believes would give him the authority to defy death.

That aura, according to Murray, can be found in the two great mystical sources: science and religion. Science gives us technology, which both causes death (the Nyodene D) and can possibly cure it (Dylar). Religion gives us the afterlife, something which also causes death (the person has died) but revives the soul as a new life form.

Murray, believing "to plot is to love," upends Jack's belief that plots move deathward. But Murray shows how a deathward plot can also be a life-affirming one -- the plot of killing. One can usurp death for one's own means by turning it on others and becoming an instrument of death. Killing, then, is like the dualities of both technology and the afterlife: with death comes the affirmation of life. Jack has already received a physical instrument of death, the gun; is he ready to turn himself into a killer?

Jack has been mystified so long about the "personal codes" and systems of others -- his ex-wives' spying background, Hitler, Babette's fear of death -- but, as the instructions for the ATM card reveal, only with one's own code can one "enter the system." Jack is afraid of finding out his own code -- literally, in the case of his medical printout that forecasts his death. As he told Murray, he does not want to know the exact date of his death, as that would be too definite. He also points out that death does not make his life more satisfying, rather, he is wracked with anxiety. His real problem is he is afraid of discovering his own private code -- his identity. Without this, life is a mystery to him, and it makes death even more mysterious.

Chapter 38:

In bed, Jack relates Murray's idea that some people can't repress their fear of death. She reminds him that repression causes a host of other ills, but he insists it's the only way to survive. He thinks about Mr. Gray, and feels he is in Mr. Gray's body.

Jack starts bringing his gun to school. He feels powerful with it. One day he examines the three bullets inside. At night, he asks Heinrich about Orest's quest. Heinrich tells him that no one would let him do it, so he had been forced to go to a hotel room in a nearby town, where the snakes bit him within a few minutes. Moreover, there were only three snakes instead of 27, and they weren't venomous. Orest has since gone into hiding.

Walking over to his office, Jack thinks someone is following him, and wonders if the gun is making him jittery. His hand on the gun in his pocket, Jack trots, then runs when he hears running from behind. He turns finally and sees Winnie Richards, who says she saw an article about the group that manufactured Dylar. She relates how they came close to succeeding, but one of their leaders, Willie Mink, ruined things by putting an ad in a newspaper for volunteers. After this, the group switched to computer testing. But they discovered that one of the volunteers began using the drug with Mink's help -- wearing a ski mask, she would meet him at a motel. Mink was fired, and the project continued. Mink still lives in the motel, in the Germantown section of Iron City.

At home, Jack argues with Babette about her habit of wearing running clothes all the time. He tells her he's going driving and doesn't know when he'll be back. She tells him to drive her to the stadium so she can run, wait for her, then drive her back. He tells her he doesn't want to do that, and that it's chilly -- she should wear a ski mask. He takes his neighbors' car -- they've been keeping the key in the ignition ever since the airborne toxic event. Trash caddies hanging from the dashboard are filled with debris. He drives to Iron City, ignoring a toll booth and two traffic lights on the way. He feels light and dreamy, but more so "an agitation of the passions." He rubs his gun.

Analysis:

Jack is inching closer to his plot of confronting Willie Mink, a.k.a. Mr. Gray. The great irony is that the motel is in Germantown; in a sense, Jack has always been close to him, to the associations of German deathliness. Perhaps the greater irony is that Babette would wear a ski mask to her meetings with Mink (something Jack bitterly reminds her of as he leaves). While Jack could never get a clear picture of Mink, it is really Babette who tried to obscure her identity. In the same way, she is obscuring her identity at home by constantly wearing her running clothes. One costume is for a sexual tryst, and one is for athletic purposes, but both conceal her.

After Jack's scare with Winnie, in which he questions if the gun makes him more fearful, he seems primed to face death fearlessly. He boldly defies the systems that previously frustrated him -- he flouts the toll booth and traffic lights, he steals a car -- and his "agitation of the passions" indicates he has tapped into the male reservoir of violence Murray and Babette spoke of previously. He even rubs his gun in a clichéd masculine pose of affection for the phallic weapon. He is surrounded by death once again -- the trash in the neighbors' car -- but now we get the sense he is above these consumerist trappings of death and is ready for the real thing.

Perhaps Jack realizes that he would rather lose to Mink than live his life in fear and insecurity. Orest's failed attempt with the snakes shows that Orest would have been better off had he died boldly than survived meekly -- at least in the eyes of Orest and the kids at school.

Chapter 39:

Jack drives through Iron City and finally finds the Roadway Motel in a deserted area. He parks elsewhere and walks back to it. His plan is to find Mr. Gray, shoot him three times in the stomach for maximum pain, make it look like a suicide, take whatever Dylar he has, then drive back to Blacksmith and park the car in Treadwell's garage. He finds himself becoming more aware of things, such as the falling rain. He walks to the motel's office, which has a gibberish message written on the door. He looks in the windows, and in one sees a figure sitting in an armchair.

Jack opens the door and sees Willie Mink, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Budweiser shorts. Mink asks if he's there for Dylar, and Jack says he is. Mink says he must behave in a manner required of rooms, a point with which Jack agrees. Jack has difficulty determining Mink's ethnicity. He studies Mink's face, and feels sorry Babette had to seek refuge in him. Mink throws a bunch of Dylar tablets at his own mouth, swallowing some. Jack asks Mink a few questions about his background to put him at ease. Mink speaks about how Dylar failed, but it will eventually succeed -- and with that, death will adapt and get stronger as well. Jack feels they are inching closer to death. Mink takes more pills.

Mink asks how much Dylar he wants to buy. Jack stares at him, imagining Babette and Mink wrapped up in sex. Mink brings up a woman in a "ski mask," whose name he now forgets, and says American sex is how he learned English. Jack repeats his plan to himself. Mink takes more pills, and Jack remembers Babette's warning of the side effects of Dylar. Jack says the words "'Falling plane,'" then "'Plunging aircraft,'" and Mink fearfully gets in a crash position. As Jack advances, Mink pulls out of his fear, and asks why Jack is here. Jack advances more, and Mink says, among other gibberish, that the woman said she wore the ski mask because kissing was "'un-American.'"

Jack repeats the plan to himself. As he holds the gun, he says "'Hail of bullets.'" Mink drops to the floor in fear and crawls to the bathroom. Jack plans to tell Mink who he is and who the woman in the ski mask is. He takes out his gun. Mink takes more pills. Jack fires and hits Mink's stomach. He fires again to feel the excitement. He wipes off the gun and puts it in Mink's hand. Then Mink shoots and hits Jack's wrist. Jack is in pain, and he's disappointed his plan didn't work perfectly. He sees colored dots at the edge of his vision.

Jack looks at Mink and feels a sense of compassion. First he tends to himself, taking out his handkerchief and tying it around his wrist. He drags Mink outside the motel and to the car, leaving his trail of blood behind