White Noise was a very strange novel.
It was a wild ruckus of a ride, but I do wish to focus on one theme: fear of doom.
This fear pervades the majority of the novel. It’s the creeping panic that rises at the thought of an ending, bleak with no hope. It’s the question surfacing quietly at the back of the mind: does our culture move too fast? Sensational, consumerist, like a car barreling down a highway out of control? With pretty moments and nice glimpses here and there, but overall a little too fast a ride for what we prefer?
The overall plot goes like this: Jack Gladney lives with his fourth wife, Babette, and their many children, in a house in an American college town. Within the family are divided opinions on technology, history, and disaster, but Jack and Babette share a pointed and deathly fear of death. Jack often struggles with the feeling that everything is meaningless.
One evening, an “airborne toxic event” drifts over the community. Within hours, the toxic cloud has spurred an entire evacuation, people with suitcases and babies spilling out onto the highway as the snow blows over them. After the situation is resolved, the community is seemingly restored to normal. But of course, it is not the same. Some people begin holding regularly scheduled evacuations, simulating another such event. Some people, like Jack, visit doctors, hoping to be told what exposure to the chemical cloud does to the human body, if it brings them any closer to death.
It makes you think about things. First, what is our society’s airborne toxic event? We’ve had several, epidemics, bombings—that altered the course of human history. In the wake of these events, people reacted and processed in different ways, but things were never the same as before the event. And in all these cases, people were forced to deal with a heightened version of a preexisting fear: fear of death.
Fear of death manifests itself in actions: avoidance, evacuations, precautions, denial, training. But mostly, people live life buried in TV, supermarket aisles, tabloids, tourism, radios—namely, white noise—trying to keep this fear at bay. Then a sensational event like the toxic cloud comes along. In the wake of the event, humanity is left questioning what really matters. If the white noise we drown ourselves in—the voices, the columns, the commentaries—will protect us, or if it will dissipate like nothing before the looming cloud called death.
