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In Don Delillo’s novel White Noise, Delillo examines modern society and both criticizes and mocks the way which we have come to live our lives. The novel can best be characterized as post modern as it looks into the lives we lead and satirizes the consumerism and underground conspiracies and crises that shape our lives today, specifically through the use of the media.
Through a series of passages, Delillo creates events which allow him to expose these human tendencies to succumb to the power of mass media and consumerism. His parodies, while often extreme, expose just how brainwashed society has become as a result of the influence of the media.

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Postmodernism, a movement that developed as an extension of modernism, has an inevitable influence in White Noise as Delillo’s characters are depicted struggling to find an answer to life and find as per postmodernism, this answer does not exist. Both Jack Gladney and his family attempt to use religion, consumerism, and science to ease the pain of reality and give themselves purpose in life. While it is human to desire answers, they are difficult to come by as all three medians fail to stand under scrutiny, furthering the idea that life holds no simple answers or solutions, “there’s no escape from death” (Delillo 275). Through his postmodernist text, Delillo proves he believes that humans find comfort in the idea that there is a reason for everything and, consequently, can be controlled through his exploration of various medians they turn to.
In an effort to ease their mind and bring understanding, Delillo’s characters look to science to provide answers and offer an element of control. Gladney looks to medicine to give him hope and security in the face of his apparently immanent death. After discovering that his exposure to Nyodene D could bring about his death in thirty years, he becomes fixated on defining the “terror of death” (187). The SIMUVAC operator who alerted him to his danger, however, was frustratingly vague, and Gladney is forced to continue to look for answers in other quantifiable methods. Gladney and Babette also discuss Dylar, the medicine Babette was taking to alleviate her “fear of death” which Gladney becomes obsessed with in his own grappling to come to terms with his discovery that “we are a sum total of our data… the sum total of our chemical impulses” (190, 192). Dylar does not in fact work nor does it do anything practical, yet the idea of relief is so intriguing that Gladney questions Babette until she falls asleep and continues to go to extreme lengths to obtain the drug; he desires a fool-proof means of control and the drug has the potential to offer this to him. While trying to find the idea that works, the characters put all their belief in one set of ideals to the exclusion of all else. For example, meteorology becomes infallible in Heinrich’s mind when he refuses to acknowledge his senses in an effort to maintain the weatherman’s assertion that rain is not coming until that night. This search leads to narrow-minded and sometimes foolish beliefs as Gladney, Babette, and Heinrich attempt to understand the life they lead, but are only let down for “there’s no scientific reason” why life is the way it is (270).
Through various means, Delillo’s characters are forced to abandon the idea that science will provide answers, instead they turn to consumerism and the media to ease the pain of death and provide a purpose in life. Consumerism has become an epidemic throughout America; particularly through the television, ideas such as “retail therapy” are promoted. In the same way, Gladney defines himself by his material possessions and attire: he relies on his sunglasses and robe to distinguish himself as the head of his Hitler studies department. After the glasses appear to have ill effects on Gladney’s vision, Babette suggests that he stop wearing them; Gladney refuses, remarking that they are necessary. After a disconcerting run-in with a colleague, Gladney feels the need to go on a shopping spree to alleviate his shame and anger. He allows him to be swept along by Babette and the girls, his “guides to endless well-being,” as they pull him through store after store, shopping “for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it… I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed” (83-4). In a similar light, the family uses the tragedies on television, like consumerism, to dull their personal sorrows and distract themselves as seen throw the family’s “Friday assembly” where they had “never been so attentive to [their] duty…Every disaster made [them] wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping” (64).
Murray suggests religion, despite his lack of personal belief, as Gladney continues to grapple with death as a means to overcome Gladney’s thoughts and shut them out. Despite its lack of solid evidence, religion appears to subscribe to the comfort of consensus as Murray sardonically cites its legitimacy in the fact that “millions of people have believed for thousands of years… this must mean something” (273). Regardless of his desperate attempt to come to terms with the “great deal of long-range solace in the idea of an afterlife,” Gladney in the end rejects religion too (273). After the nun fails to assure him of the validity of this, only explaining that “it is [their] task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously… to embody old things, old beliefs,” the nuns are only symbols, “homogenous presence” that preserve world order (303, 302). Gladney is unable to receive any assurance that there is life beyond death and adopts the despairing reality that we are left to face the end of life alone.
When viewed through the lens of postmodernism, Delillo’s White Noise exemplifies the human search for meaning and logic in a world of anarchy as the main characters attempt to employ different medians to direct their thoughts, subsequently easing their minds. As appears to be in human nature, Gladney and his family are forced to abandon the idea of infallible and definitive answers as religion, consumerism, and science all prove faulty.



i havent read it over or edited at all so forgive the grevious errors... i'll get back to that haha. feel free to tear it up and edit it right on this post.