A Thesis for the Master of Arts

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature

National Cheng Kung University

The End of Time, Natural History and Post-apocalypse:

American Innocence in Don DeLillos White Noise

Graduate StudentYen-hung Chen

AdvisorProf. Shu-li Chang

101 2
Feb 2012

Abstract
After its publication in 1985, White Noise has been regarded as one of the most
representative works expressive of postmodern zeitgeist. While depictions of such cultural
phenomena as advertisement and consumerism make up of the major part of this novel, Don
DeLillo presents a story diluted by miscellaneous incidents through the eyes of the
protagonist Jack Gladney to portray the different aspects of postmodern everyday life. As a
professor, husband and father, Jack, who lives in the midst of and is within the information
network interwoven by the mass media, supermarket and technologies, faces various tedious
duties and plays different banal rolesflirting provocatively with Hitler studies to secure his
career, finding out his wifes secret medication, sitting with his family in front of television
on each Friday night and so on. Yet, though his life is stuffed with trivial happenings, to Jack,
he cant help thinking about death. No matter how hard he tries to carry his life purposelessly,
Jack is unable to get rid of the sudden intrusion of fear and anxiety provoked by his thought
on death. In this thesis, in order to explain why DeLillo makes White Noise a seemingly
uncritical work that focuses on the banality of Jacks everyday life, I will attempt to flesh out
the discourse of American innocence hidden under the narrative surface of this novel, which I
would borrow James Bergers idea of Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric to outline its
characteristics in the introduction. Chapter One, by emphasizing on the paradoxical temporal
relatedness and thematic unrelatedness of consecutive events in White Noise, aims at making
sense of the structural aporia in DeLillos work. From a review of three critics essays and by
drawing on Gerhard Hoffmanns notion of situationalism, I would like to indicate the
dichotomized interpretations made both by critics and by Hoffmann, all of whom are too
eager to extract a positive meaning out of the novel to touch and confront the nucleus of the
structural innovation of White Noise. Though those critics try to put their emphases on
finding out images that can, in a way, explain the paradox they find in this work, they all
avoid explaining what that paradox means and instead they simply attempt to substitute it

with either an image of thought or a possibility of multiplicity. To avoid falling prey to this
easy dichotomization, I will turn to the core of the paradox in DeLillos workthe
paradoxical sense of time. Rather than grounding my reading on the binary logic of
either-orunity/parts, one/many or duration/moments, I argue instead that there is an implicit
desire hidden behind the paradoxical sense of time in White Noisea wish to be innocent or
free from the burdens of time, one that, on the one hand, makes the novel insensitive to the
demand for thematic significance, and, on the other hand, drives the story to move
headlong to the end of time. Then, in Chapter Two, to continue my explorations on the sense
of innocence emanated from and if not rhetorically performed in White Noise, I will place my
focus on Jacks obsession with death by elaborating on and linking it with the notion of the
end of time I discuss in Chapter One. Firstly, by drawing on Walter Benjamin and Eric
Santners explanations on natural history, I attempt to discuss what the relations between
death and the end of time in this work. Whereas, in a thematic level, the novel seems
preoccupied with deatha will-be state of being that prompts either Jack or reader to grasp
what Jack/his full being is; in a formal level, the novel seems to move in a circuitous manner
that both moves towards and away from the end of time. As such, the novel repeatedly
interrupts its own narrative course and leaves behind embodiments of death, those remains
that constitute for Santner a natural history, in its course at the same time. Such natural
history making not only induces us readers to dig out what those consecutive but unrelated
narrated remainings signify. A sense of incomprehensible marks on Jacks habitual response
in life, given that he doesnt respond to any kind of change brought by occurrences at all
because the only apocalypse is his own death. Then, I will analyze how Jack faces death in
this work to further describe his insistence on his innocence, an innocence that is masked as
and covered under his perverse confidence in his ability to keep death awayhe thinks he is
the exception. Finally, before getting back to Bergers elucidation on post-apocalypse rhetoric,
in the conclusion, I will summarize what Id discussed in my thesis first. By rewinding how

Jacks innocence is presented by the form and the content in White Noisethe paradoxical
sense of time and death as a structural element and a narrative force, I would like to connect
these features expressive of innocence in the novel to ones of Reaganist post-apocalyptic
rhetoric. While both share the sense of time that eliminates distinctions among past, presence
and future, and a disavowal attitude that endeavors to protect their own beliefs, I will
allegorize DeLillos work to other historical contexts and references of American culture.
Then, to conclude, I will discuss the relation between Jacks innocence and his postmodern
environment as wellhe doesnt know how to respond it other than remaining his innocent
optimism in his own belief.

Keywords: the end of time; natural history; post-apocalyptic rhetoric; American innocence


1985

To my advisor, Prof. Shu-li Chang, who kindly tolerates my unwise behaviors, sets up an
exemplary model I greatly esteem and provides me with numerous help; my committee
members who gave me lots of useful advices; my families who always supports me with their
silent worries; Wan-chi Weng who quietly waits for my slow thesis writing and my dear
friends who accompanies me no matter what I did and what happened

Table of Contents
Introduction: Why Noise?---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1

Chapter One: The End of Time---------------------------------------------------------------------------------9

Reading for Unity or Reading for Multiplicity--------------------------------------------------------15
Situationalism for Multiplicity--------------------------------------------------------------------------22
Toward the End of Time---------------------------------------------------------------------------------30

Chapter Two: Natural History---------------------------------------------------------------------------------34

Remnants or Living on-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------36
Natural History: Benjamin and Santner----------------------------------------------------------------46
Innocence Revealing--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------55

Conclusion: Toward Post-apocalypse------------------------------------------------------------------------67

Works Cited------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------73

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Introduction

Why Noise?

All you have to do is to tell the truth

What truth does he want?...
...He wants your truth.
What good is my truth? My truth means nothing
White Noise (23)

After its publication in 1985, White Noise has long been considered as one of the most
representative works expressive of postmodern zeitgeist. While descriptions about cultural
phenomena like technology, advertisement and consumerism make up the major part of this novel,
Don DeLillo, through the eyes of the protagonist Jack Gladney, presents a story diluted by
miscellaneous incidents for portraying different aspects of postmodern everyday life. As a professor,
husband and father who lives in the midst of the information network interwoven by the mass media,
supermarket and technologies, Jack not only needs to fulfill tedious duties in his daily life, but also
plays various banal roles entangled in the so-called postmodern circumstancesimulating the
appearance of Hitler for securing his career, finding out what his wifes secret medication that aims
at eliminating her fear of death, sitting with his family in front of television on each Friday night
and so on. Yet, even though his life is stuffed with trivial happenings, to Jack, he cant help thinking
about death incessantly. No matter how hard he tries to carry his life purposelessly, Jack is unable to
get rid of the sudden intrusion of fear and anxiety provoked by his thought on death. So, in this
novel, through so diverse textual exportationspostmodernity, quotidian life, fear of death et cetera,
DeLillo presents a rather noisy work. Given that presentation of each cultural image presents

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discrepant figurations of significance, this novel, for readers and critics, is like a reservoir
overloaded with information. While it cues us to read it from several perspectives it relates toa
highly capitalized society, a world filled with simulations or even a metaphysical inquiry about
ones existence, such heteroglossic significations in White Noise not only blur our foci on digging
an interpretation about it out, but also make it too unspecific to be critical.
In this thesis, in order to explain such an interpretative deadlock DeLillos White Noise
poseswhy an uncritical work that focuses on the banality of Jacks postmodern daily life is
regarded as a representative of postmodern novel, I will attempt to flesh out the discourse of
American innocence hidden under the narrative surface of this work, which construes why it is
uncritical via Jacks narration and how it corresponds to its postmodern context. Yet, before delving
into my analysis that targets at depicting innocence in the novel, in this introduction, firstly I would
like to take a detour to James Bergers idea of post-apocalypse which concerns about the Reaganist
rhetoric popular in 1980s. By indicating two features of such rhetoricit manifests a distinctive
sense of time that breaks distinctions among past, presence and future, and issues a denial that
negates the existence of trauma for preserving perfection of America, I will take Bergers idea as a
template for understanding the deadlock in DeLillos work. That is, inasmuch as Jacks narrative in
this novel also characterizes with these two features, which I will discuss in my two chapters about
its form and its contents respectively, I argue that this rhetoric not only helps us to see the innocence
DeLillo designs to present via Jacks narrative. It assists us to recognize an epistemological attitude
toward postmodern condition as well. As post-apocalyptic rhetoric displays the confidence in what
it intends to upholdflawlessness of America the nation, Jacks narrative also carries such
all-knowing optimism. To Jack, it is his belief in his good life that exhibits this innocent confidence.
Then, after explanations of Bergers idea, in the following, I will briefly introduce the scheme of my
thesis. Through two terms I coin to describe the conceptual figuration of the form and the content of
White Noisethe end of time and natural history, I would like to present how I try to prove

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DeLillos work is post-apocalyptic, which bespeaks DeLillos irresponsive response to postmodern

condition through its presentation of the paradoxical sense of time and its disavowal attitude toward
admitting its imperfection.

What is the Reaganist Post-apocalypse Rhetoric?

To Berger, Reaganist post-apocalypse rhetoric bears two distinct characteristics. Firstly, as it
clings to a belief that America was perfect in its inception, has always been perfect, and is perfect
today (134), such rhetoric carries out a peculiar sense of timeits like a prophecy that the result
was ever achieved and is fulfilled in advance while it is made. Taking Reagans campaign speech in
1984 as an instance, Berger quotes: It was a second American revolution [he says of his first term],
and its only just begun. But America is back, a giant, powerful in its renewed spirit, its growing
economy, powerful in its ability to build a new future. And you know something? Thats not
debatable (qtd. in 136). For Reagan, though his so-called revolution just begins, America whose
statusa powerful and giant-like presence that is undebatable and a will-behas already been
achieved. That is, the revolution had finished revolting. America, with its renewed spirit and
growing economy, has already acquired the ability to build up a new future now. The revolution that
just begins had already succeeded because its effect has arrived. Yet, via Reagans
sayingAmerica is back, it seems like that such new America isnt a real new one. Rather, it
was something ever existed before but disappeared for a while. Through the revolution that just
begins and has achieved its wonderful results, such once existed America is back and sets up a
possibility for bridging Americans to a new future. So to speak, in Reaganist post-apocalypse
rhetoric, a singular sense of time dominates its narrative logic. If the revolutionwhat brings the
end of the world as we know it (Hall 3), namely, the apocalypseis prophesized, such an
undebatable ending revealed in this prophecyAmerica is back and is powerful in being able to
bring up a new futureis what will and must occur. However, in Reagans speech, this ending has

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already happened. Whereas the status that America is ready for a new future is post-apocalyptic
for America had experienced the revolution he refers to, such readiness had been there when
Reagan says his speech/prophecy outAmerica is back and is powerful enough. Besides, while this
prophecy delivers a teleological view that both the end and the destiny of America are
includedbeing powerful for a better future, this future that will befall has already been
contained by its origin paradoxically. It is about the once powerful America that was lost, is going
to be retained and has even been acquired again. Therefore, for Berger, in this kind of rhetoric, an
achieved utopia is displayed (138). For Reaganist, only perfection will be, must be and is
achieved in America.
Nevertheless, why does Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric operate in this way? Berger
explains that Reaganism, the dominant political direction of the 1980s (138), is a composite
ideological phenomenon that covers plural political and historical sources. While it appertains to
positions such as economics, military strategy, religion, sexuality and law that attempt[s] in
some way to undo the incomplete changes of [the 1960s] (139), Reaganism, regarding the 1960s as
a site of trauma or apocalypse owing to what Americans are reminded of in the civil right
movement in that decadethe history of the racial oppression, like the slave trade and the
destruction of Native American cultures (140), reacts to purge such imperfection through its
distinctive narrative pattern. That is to say, for Berger, Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric is not
only an exemplification of a belief in Americas perfection. Its also a distinctive expression that
denies or disavows the historical trauma as well. Like how Reagan illustrates Martin Luther Kings
achievement in a speech given on Kings birthday in 1987, he, via his post-apocalyptic rhetoric,
rejects the fact that the racial injustice ever exists in America. Berger quotes: What he
accomplishednot just for black Americans, but for all Americanshe lifted a heavy burden from
this country. As surely as black Americans were scarred by the yoke of slavery, America was
scarred by injustice. Many Americans didnt fully realize how heavy Americas burden was until it

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was lifted (qtd. in 143). Even though Reagans words seemingly focus on depicting what King
does for Americato lift the burden of the racial injustice, there is an implication in his speech that
this burden, for him, does not really exist. Whereas it was not realized by most Americans until it
was solved by Kings accomplishment, this injustice is not what people know before it disappears.
Put it differently, as the racial injustice is not acknowledged by most Americans, except for black
Americans, at all, it doesnt exist in, at least, white Americans world. Besides, for they know
nothing about it, the racism can never be a problem for them, either. However, to Reagan, the most
important thing is not whether the racial injustice ever existed in America or not. Instead, since
America was scarred by the racial injustice which is now lifted, racism does not linger in America
anymore. That is, the racism, as something unknown in the past, is not a problem now. Though it
might be a problem that most Americans did not sense in the past, its out of responsibilities of
Reagan or white Americans in 1980s. So, in his speech, Reagan, via his post-apocalypse rhetoric
that denies existence of the racism for America is always believed to be perfect, manifests
characteristics of his narrativesthe traditional American apocalyptic prophecywhat America
will be, or is meant to be, or ought to beslides instantaneously into post-apocalyptic fulfillment
(145). Namely, for Reagan, America is and has always been New Jerusalem or City on a Hill or
promised land (143). To preserve its perfection, in his rhetoric acts, to deny what reminds of its
imperfectionhistorical trauma such as racism in the past or presentis needed repeatedly.
Therefore, for Berger, Reaganism in 1980s exemplifies a peculiar way of rhetoric form that
attempt to reconcile its vision of America as an achieved utopiawith destabilizing events and
ideasthat called this vision into question (xviii). In Reaganists view, whereas America is
perfect and has always been perfect (135), the post-apocalyptic rhetoric that negates flaws or
trauma twicenothing bad or unjust existed in the past and exist in the presence, or nothing was
imperfect in the past and is imperfect nownot only bespeaks its optimism within its negative
attitude but also cues us a way to understand why its sense of time is folded into one. That is to say,

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in order to protect this achieved utopia from any forms of damages, Reaganist post-apocalyptic
rhetoric exercises its epistemological sovereignty supported by its belief through simultaneously
predicting and fulfilling the apocalypse, or a change, it expects. With such an epistemological
stance, in this thesis, I would like to further explicate it is what Jack maintains in White Noise. On
the one hand, while Bergers idea of post-apocalypse relates to 1980s, I would like to unlock the
allegorical potential of White Noise which is not limited to one expression but is open to other
historical contexts and references of American culture. On the other hand, since Reaganists
post-apocalypse is a post-apocalypse that has repressed its apocalyptic moment (emphasis added
135), via this narrative feature, I would like to add that Jacks innocence is more than a caricature of
American culture. As such innocence is also his responses toward postmodern circumstance he
inhabits in, it exposes Jack or DeLillos irresponsive responsehe cant criticize it directly nor
accept it totally; therefore, he can only un-resolve his narrative and remains optimistically confident
in what he can control.

Whats Next?
Chapter One, by emphasizing on the paradoxical temporal relatedness and thematic
unrelatedness of consecutive events in White Noise, aims at making sense of the structural aporia in
DeLillos work. From a review of three critics essays and by drawing on Gerhard Hoffmanns
notion of situationalism, I would like to indicate the dichotomized interpretations made both by
critics and Hoffmann, all of whom are too eager to extract a positive meaning out of this novel to
touch and confront the nucleus of the structural contradiction in White Noise. Although those critics
try to put their emphases on finding out images that can, in a way, explain the paradox they find in
this work, they all avoid explaining what this paradox means and instead simply attempt to
substitute it with either an image of thought or the possibility of multiplicity. In this chapter, to
avoid falling prey to this easy dichotomization, I will turn my analysis to the core of the paradox in

Chen 7

White Noisethe paradoxical sense of time. Rather than grounding my reading on the binary logic
of either-orunity/parts, one/many or duration/moments, I argue that there is instead an implicit
desire hidden behind such sense of time in DeLillos novela wish to be innocent, one that, on the
one hand, makes the novel insensitive to the demand for thematic significance, and, on the other
hand, drives the story to move headlong to the end of time. That is, time in White Noise seems never
ends and it can thus continue ad infinitum.
Then, in Chapter Two, to continue my explorations on the sense of innocence emanated from
and if not rhetorically performed in White Noise, I will place my focus on Jacks obsession with
death by elaborating on and linking it with the notion of the end of time I discuss in Chapter One.
Firstly, by drawing on Walter Benjamin and Eric Santners explanations on natural history, I attempt
to discuss what the relations between death and the end of time in this work. Whereas, in a thematic
level, the novel seems to be preoccupied with deatha will-be state of being that prompts either
Jack or reader to grasp what Jacks/his full being is, the novel seems to move in a circuitous manner
that both moves towards and away from the end of time in a formal level. As such, the novel
repeatedly interrupts its own narrative course and leaves behind embodiments of death, those
remains that constitute for Benjamin and Santner a natural history, in its course at the same time.
Such natural history making not only manifests how Jack is continuously haunted by his fear of
death and how he responds to it in the novelhe shuns death as if it is what he can totally
understand. A sense of incomprehensibility marks on Jacks habitual response in life as well, given
that he doesnt respond to any kind of change brought by occurrences at all because he only
believes in what he recognizes. That is, like how he negates death as a knowable thing in his life, he
is in fact confident in what he thinks to be the truth. Then, by adopting Henry F. Mays idea of
American innocence, I would like to further explicate the epistemological position Jack takes in
White Noise. Forasmuch as Jack keeps himself from death within a knowable distance, I contend,
such ability he thinks he owns, except for his innocence in his exceptional state, discloses Jacks

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confidence in his invincibility. From two textual instanceshow Jack reacts to two major and
deathly events in the novel, the airborne toxic event and his revenge on Mink due to Babettes affair,
I would like to indicate how such innocence influences Jacks actshe so trusts in his own ideal
that he becomes careless about how he achieves it and what he undergoes.
Lastly, in the conclusion, before returning to Bergers post-apocalypse, I will summarize what
Id discussed in my thesis first. By rewinding how Jacks innocence is presented by the form and
the content in White Noisethe paradoxical sense of time and death as a structural element and a
narrative force, I would like to connect these features expressive of innocence in the novel to ones
of Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric. While both share the sense of time that eliminates
distinctions among past, presence and future, and a disavowal attitude that endeavors to protect their
own beliefs, I will allegorize DeLillos work to other historical contexts and references of American
culture. Then, to conclude, I will also discuss the relation between Jacks innocence and his
postmodern environmenthe doesnt know how to respond it other than remaining his innocent
optimism in his own belief.

Chen 9

Chapter One
The End of Time

Is a symptom a sign or a thing? What is a thing and

how do we know its not another thing?
White Noise (126)

White Noise, one of the most representative novels of postmodern literature, poses difficulty of
comprehension to the readers, mainly because what the novel is regarded to illustratea
postmodern cultural condition which is suspicious of absolute truth and which embraces
multiplicityresists easy comprehension. Although the story in White Noise is not too difficult to
understand, its narrative which chronologically describes what happens to Jack in one year presents
manifold postmodern phenomena but does not offer its reader a singular focus that can enable us to
decipher what this novel means. Take the first and the last chapter of this novel as examples. The
novel begins with a scene in which the first-person narrator/character Jack, while looking at a
parade of station wagons driving in and out of the campus with proud parents dropping their college
kids on the first day of class, thinks to himself how this assembly of station wagons suggests to
them that they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation (4).
Yet, the novel ends with three unrelated scenesfirst of Wilder riding bravely on his bicycle across
a busy highway, then of Babette, Wilder and Jack watching the sunset together, and finally of their
shopping at an identified supermarket. Taking together, the beginning and the end of the novel
exemplify how, on the one hand, the narration lacks coherence, and, on the other, Jacks life also
lacks purpose and significance.
Through the use of this piling up of unrelated episodes in which nothing significant actually
happens, the narrator Jack introduces, rather randomly, his work, family life and his thoughts. A

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narrative model is set up in chapter onein a chronological order his reflections and accounts of
disassociated events are interlaced into a narrative. In chapter one of this novel, for instance, Jack
begins by describing how parents and students arrive in station wagons, forming an assembly as if
they were a people, a nation. A page later, he moves on to describe his banal and eventless family
life, as he lives at the end of a quiet street with Babette and their children by previous
marriages, while working as the chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College
on-the-Hill (4). There is no logical connection between Jacks thoughts about the station-wagon
assembly and his life, regardless his domestic or professional one. Yet, the narration which conjoins
both seems to homogenize them into one sequence where a focal point dominates. In other words, it
is the narration that provides the structural principle of chapter one. In terms of the contents of
these events described, there is no discernible logical connection among them. Such dissociation
between the expression of narrative form and that of content is not only pervasive in the first
chapter of this novel. Its even obvious in the last chapter as well. As Jack jumps from one pointless
scene to anotherfrom Wilders death-defying bicycle ride, the sunset watch and shopping at the
supermarket, this concluding chapter that is supposed to wrap up the loose ends of this novel neither
concludes anything, nor does it relate back to two major events occurred in previous chaptersthe
toxic event and Jacks revenge on Mink.
Of course, it is possible for us to argue that the three seemingly unrelated scenes described in
the last chapter do resonate with the main themes of the novel such as death, community and
consumerism. It is also possible for us to insist that the placing of these three unrelated scenes
together in one chapter represents an authorial strategy to underscore the singularity of each
otherwise insignificant event of the everyday. Without any precession or succession that induces
their happenings or closes the effect they bring up in the story, these three events presented in the
last chapter seemingly depart from the stream of time theyre situated in. As if they can be placed in
any part of this story because of their untimeliness, these three events which close White Noise

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without truly ending it manifest the paradox caused by the opposition between their positions in the
temporal sequence of the novel and their assumed thematic significancethey are expected to end
the novel but they do not at all. Thus, White Noise, while seemingly pointing towards some themes
without placing focus upon any particular theme, exhibits one interpretive aporia: what does the
novel mean as it presents so many details, scenes, and events, without eventually expressing much,
at least not much that is of any significance?
Generally speaking, the so-called narrative contains both actions or events, which prompt the
progress of the story, and characters whose characteristics or motivations are revealed through their
actions. The novel, as an extended narrative (novel 226), doubtlessly carries greater
complications of plot, character, et cetera. So to speak, whilst we aim to understand a narrative or a
novel, we, except for plot and character, often overlook one of its fundamental componentsa sort
of consistency that sustains the evolution of plots and development of characters. Namely, since a
narrative/novel/story is one spatial temporal entity created by the presentation of its plot, character
and so on, we, through our spending the time of reading it page by page, will gradually unfold what
it conveys within its flow of time. Such process of understandingwe engage in excavating the
messages hidden within typed lines to enter a fictional world (or a virtual time/space) to experience
what it enclosesdemands our paying attention to the spatio-temporal movement of a narrative.
For us, not until the end can we ascertain what a story really means. Whats more, as long as such
spatio-temporal consistency is maintained throughout the narrative, it indicates that the sequential
order a story bears is also sustained. A narrative, in other words, is thematically significant and
sense-making as long as it maintains, sustains, and retains its temporal sequentiality. That is to say,
a narrative can be said to be word-making and world-making when it follows a linear and causal
sequentiality that temporally moves from a beginning to an end and casually moves from the cause
to an effect. Or, at least, a narrative can be understood as a serial of events even though its narrated
in non-chronological order.

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Given our premise that a narrative/novel/story grounds its thematic significance on the
consistency of its narrative movement, especially on the temporal movement of its narrative, we can
better understand why DeLillos White Noise, though it is replete with actions and events, ends up
telling us little about what the novel really means. Like what the first and the last chapters of White
Noise demonstratethe excess of unrelated events and the lacking of a consistent thematic focus
underscore an interpretative aporia. On the one hand, whereas a series of events are related within
the spatio-temporal movement of a narrative, the form of a story will also mold its contents in
accordance with the scope and sequence of these events and actions. However, as my discussion of
the opening and the closing chapters of DeLillos White Noise makes clear, there is a clearly
discernible gap between the excess of consecutive events and the formal un-relatedness of these
events: Jacks looking at the parade of station wagons doesnt seem to be a significant event that
bears any relevancy to other events in Jacks life; likewise, Wilders bike ride, the sunset watch and
the reshuffling of shelves in the supermarket dont relate to each other, either. Such disconnection
between the contents of the novel and its form not only blurs presentations of White Noise through
an out-of-focused lens, but it also gives each singular event a sense of incompletion, thereby
depriving each of any constitutive thematic signification as well.
On the other hand, the discrepancy between the expression of form and contents in DeLillos
novel, rather than simply exhibits an interpretative aporia of this work for us readers, demonstrates
the ambiguity of time that furthers this difficulty of interpretation. Although White Noise, by
relating accounts of a series of events taking place chronologically in a year, does tie each narrated
event into one sequence, the nonsequentiality brought by noncausal relations among the narrated
events instead smashes any readerly expectation for consistency excited by the linear narrative form
in DeLillos work. Time, as a measuring medium which is used to order events and quantify rate of
change, is made paradoxical thanks to the discordance between the form and contents in this novel.
Whilst all happenings are joined in one sequence of time and divided by their irrelevant relations,

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every event seems to be both a narrated duration and a part of the linear time simultaneously. Like
those events in the first and last chapters of White Noisethey, regardless of their noncausal
relations, are put into a sequential course of narrative so that every event in this work becomes
perplexing in terms of the overall meaning the novel conveys. That is, in the sense of time, each
event in the novel becomes a moment and a part of the durationa singularity and an element that
constitutes a part of the theme.
A paradox thus arises. Given that there is an excess of unrelated events in White Noise, each
event may be thematic significant for it seems to suggest a thematic lesson. Yet, not only each event
is singular, but also it is non-resonant with one another so that, taken together, these events do not
point towards a singular idea that can be taken as the ultimate meaning or theme of the novel. This
is not to say that these events are not, in a curious way, related; after all, they are placed into a
temporal sequence and are therefore temporally related. Such paradoxical doublenessas events
are temporally related but thematically unrelatednot only influences our ways of understanding
each of themevents in this work may be important/irregular details or trivial/quotidian
descriptions. It also forces us to take different paths while we try to analyze what White Noise
signifies; that is, neither to read this novel whose formal unity signifies the singularity of its
thematic significance nor to read it as a novel whose temporality, or lack of it, connotes multiple but
different themes. Thus, it is the contradictory sense of time produced by the discrepancy between
the form and content in Jacks narrative that makes White Noise aporetic in its own significance.
The chronological yet noncausal narrative provides us clues for interpretations though; it takes us to
one impasse where a paradox between the expression of its form and contents ends up
compounding its ambiguous sense of time. How to make sense of this interpretative aporia posed by
the discordance between form and content that we find in DeLillos White Noise, I argue,
constitutes a large bulk of scholarship on this postmodern classic. While some critics may spend
much time considering which perspective the reader should take, most try invariably to either

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impose a singularity of meaning on this form/content discordance or see this discrepancy as the
authors celebration of the multiplicity of unrelated events of the everyday.
In this chapter, taking cues from the aporia White Noise unveils to us readers, I would like to
further my observation to examine why we shall adopt a very different position to explain DeLillos
novel. As what Id discussed in the introductory partthis novel isnt easy for us to understand
because of the paradoxical temporal relatedness and thematic unrelatedness of consecutive events, it
may be difficult for us to interpret it to fit it into our conventional demands or expectations for the
unity or coherence between form and content. The literature review that I provide in the following
yields evidence of the strenuous efforts made by three critics to make sense of the structural aporia
outlined above. Whilst those critics put their emphases on finding out images that can, in a way,
explain away, the paradox they find in the novel. Both ways of interpreting the novel are too
positive to touch the nucleus of such a structural paradox in White Noise. They avoid explaining
what that paradox means and attempt to substitute that with either an image or a possibility of
multiplicity. To avoid the conceptual bind that traps the scholarly studies of DeLillos White Noise
in the binarism of either searching for a structural unity or to celebrate structural fragmentation, I
opt to draw upon Gerhard Hoffmanns notion of situationalism as the episteme of the postmodern
era so as to activate the multiple interpretative possibilities opened up by this stylistic paradox that
we find in DeLillos White Noise. Finally, in the final part of this chapter, I will turn to the core of
the paradox in DeLillos workthe paradoxical sense of time. In this part, instead of grounding my
standpoint on the binary logic of either-orunity/parts, one/many or duration/momentsand
avoiding falling prey to this easy dichotomization, I would like to point out an implicit desire
hidden behind the end of time is produced by the paradoxical sense of time in White Noisea wish
to be innocent that makes the novel uncritical yet drives the story to move headlong to the end of
time.

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Reading for Unity or Reading for Multiplicity

In Closing the Loop: White Noise, Tom LeClair interprets White Noise as a closing of a
large loop in DeLillos career (207).1 For LeClair, while DeLillo is one alleged system novelist
who creates his works as a dynamic whole that model[s] the qualities of living systems (234),
his worksregardless of the individual work separately or all as a wholeare congruent in their
subjects and loop strateg[ies] (233). White Noise, a work stressing on a motifdeathand
synthesizing subjects and writing techniques adopted in Americana and End zone (208, 207), builds
up an intertextual loop that references both to itself and to DeLillos other works owing to its
structural and stylistic reductiveness (211). For instance, by inverting and combining materials of
his former works, and by referencing to the domestic settings in Americana and collegiate settings
in End Zone, DeLillo makes White Noise like a novel that retell stories already told in both.
Moreover, as three subgenresaround-the-house realist novel, disaster novel and college
novelare sequentially featured in the three parts of this work and strangely fades off into
overlapping genres in the plot, White Noise displays a reductive circularity in its narrative form.
Thus, while subgenre in this work is repeatedly recycled, played, exhausted of their generic
possibilities only for being resurrected to a new one, LeClair contends that the structural principle
of White Noise is a series of loops given that the characters in the novel are all victims of a
self-inflicted double bind: fearing death and desiring transcendence (11). It is the entrapment in
this self-inflicted double bind that dooms the narrator to move in a series of circuitous loops that
constantly refers both to previous actions and to futuristic events. LeClair thus claims that it is to
demonstrate the self-destructive loops of Gladneys sad foolishness that DeLillo should decide to
employ a continuous ironic reversal, trapping and retrapping his characters in their contradictions
(11-12, 12). With such a conscientious use of loops, LeClair proclaims, White Noise explains
1

When LeClair published his critical work in 1987, DeLillo published eight novels (there would be nine if Amazon,
published under pseudonymCleo Birdwellin 1980 is counted in). And, among those novels, the last and the latest
one is White Noise in 1985 (not until 1988 did DeLillo publish a new book). Therefore, to LeClair, since White Noise
was temporarily the last novel DeLillo published, its why he called White Noise a closing of a large loop in DeLillos
career (207).

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away the contradictory disparity between the absurd situations in which the Gladneys find
themselves and the impossibility of attributing a definitive signification to these seemingly
meaningless events. What remains is thus this ironic awareness of being trapped in this absurd but
real double bind. Oddly enough, LeClair proceeds to argue, this ironic awareness can also be
translated into and taken as a hope that some possibility of newness among these absurd remains
can still emerge out of this double bindthere is a chance for both writer and readers to discover
something that is uncertain but not-yet categorized in the debris of those clashed opposites.
However, to Peter Boxall, White Noise is less a system novel than a novel which vibrates
with a kind of latent critical potential (130). For Boxall, as the title of this novel is prophesied in
DeLillos previous workThe Namesand is provocatively hinted by narrator of The Names,
James Axton, who opens his narration by describing a strange sense of time, dead time,
experienced in the international flight travel, thereby serving as a sonic accompaniment to a kind
of absence from history (109), White Noise is just like a fulfillment of its own prophecylike
death itself (110)since it tells a story about Jacks life in one year through its plotless narrative,
while detailing, in a jumpy yet chronological style, Jacks fear of and confrontation with the
prospect of death. That is, because of its contradictory motifsits about a period of time in Jacks
life and about Jacks wish to take his narrative as an antidote to his fear of death (111), this novel
carries no temporal tension or historical detail in the narrative time (110). So to speak, whilst
White Noise presents a part of Jacks personal history and actualizes its own prophesied death-like
quality without utilizing any distinct temporal markers, the novel, being set in a motionless and
thusly dead time, is about and of dead time. Nevertheless, in Boxalls view, even though White
Noise is like the occurrence whose traces of its occurring are intended to be wiped out on the axis of
history by cancelling its own existences, this novel opens a kind of historical gap, a pocket of
empty time from its suspension of time (115). As one avant-garde work whose critical power
appears in the throes of its disappearance (125), White Noise makes itself a picture of emptying

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now, which is crowded with historical ghosts who wait to be animated, to be given a voice (130).
Boxall urges, through this simultaneous presentation of time and its cancellation, White Noise
therefore activates a kind of critical potential by driving readers to discover what the novel means
and how it deals with the threat that the end of time poses.
However, in Foreign Objects, or, DeLillo Minimalist, Andrew Hoberek points out that White
Noise proffers a critique against the systematic abstractions that governed U.S. foreign policy by
pointing out three formal strategies used in its narrativeminimalist, postmodern novel and trauma
narrative (102). For Hoberek, White Noise, grounded in a historical moment when people in
America realize the declining international authority of U.S. and their false belief in a
universalizing model of development due to the failed implementations of two foreign
affairsVietnam War and Iran Revolution (110, 102), resists any model of thought based on
systematic abstractions of modernization theories through the provocative use of the aesthetic of
particulars and what Robert Chodat calls the aesthetic of the heap (103, qtd. in 107).2 Hoberek
proclaims, in terms of the minimalist formal style which focuses on what Mark McGurl describes as
the smallness, privacy, and racial homogeneity of domestic life in the late 1970s and 80s (qtd. in
101), DeLillo presents this work in a privatizing turn that disregards the context White Noise is
engulfed in. With an engagement with aspects of contemporary reality (104), Hoberek quotes
McGurl to say that DeLillo concentrates his storytelling on merely personal experience (qtd. in
104). Yet, even though such an investment in concrete objects does pave the way to an aesthetic
of particulars in White Noise (114), to Hoberek, DeLillo paradoxically manifests his concerns with
2

According to Hoberek, modernization theory was proposed by social science scholars in the late 1950s and was
installed at the center of U.S. foreign policy by Kennedy administration (102). Hoberek quotes Michael E. Latham to
point out that the objective of this theory is to help the so-called Third World to [accelerate] the natural process
through which traditional societies would move toward the enlightened modernity most clearly presented by America
itself (qtd. in 102). Hoberek quotes Nils Gilman to propose, as Americans believe in one ideal terminus (qtd. in
102), for, as Gilman has so characterized it, Americans believe that America as an ideal terminus should be a
well-developed country with social leveling to minimize class distinctions; state-guided industrialism; an exaltation of
rationalism, science, and expertise as the guide for democratic institutions; and convergence on a consensual model of
social organization based on progressive taxation and state provision of social benefits (qtd. in 102), a universalizing
model of development is conceived and is adopted to help other countries to progress (102). Therefore, to Hoberek, the
systematic abstraction is produced in such a system of presumptionsit presupposes the development would be natural
and that development should be like what America underwent.

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contemporary history while there are several foreign objects appearing on the narrative edge of
White Noise. For instance, objects like Chun Ducs name and a tall old Moorish movie theater
tell the presences of Middle East and Vietnam in this novel (112). Though theyre implicit in
DeLillos writing, Hoberek reasons, those still evidence DeLillos concern about the failure of U.S.
foreign policy or the ethos of his age. And, such indexical reference to historical context even
relates White Noise to postmodernism as wellboth carry the explicit political and historical
interests (121). Nevertheless, except for its thematic and formal congruity with postmodern and
minimalist fictions, Hoberek further argues, this novel corresponds to another genre, trauma
narrative, too. As DeLillos work is presented without an explicit narrative framework that
prioritizes fragmentation (107), its fragmented narrative that relates to a tacit concern with a
historical context in which only with the help of an aesthetic of the heap can a succession of
traumatic eventsVietnam War especiallybe articulated. Hoberek thus quotes Chodat to argue
that the breakdown of the linear narrative in DeLillos novel can be related to the kind of trauma
narratives practiced by the Vietnam novelists (107).
That is, White Noise can be seen as either a postmodern fiction or a trauma fiction not only
because it deploys a conscious aesthetic strategy that links the fictional events to historical events,
but also because, as Chodat perceptively points out, it features both a breakdown in the economy
of representation as an aesthetic response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event
(qtd. in 107, qtd. in 101). Moreover, while such a breakdown of linear narrative indicates a fall
(107, 116)an impossibility of ascertaining what is the truth or of returning to the origin site of
traumatic events, DeLillos minimalist engagement complements this disbelief by placing the
narrative attention on objects only. Therefore, by using narrative strategies which bear affinities to
these three formal strategies but showing subtle differences from them as well, White Noise not only
displays its resistances to a predetermined model of generic expectations that may limit our
understandings toward a work, but also manifests a political possibility hidden beneath its

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compound and paradoxical narrative presentations: there is an implicit concern about failures of the
U.S. foreign policy, which is shown in its minimalist form that ostensibly bespeaks its apolitical
domesticity (121).
From the arguments made by the three critics outlined above, we could discover a rather
interesting phenomenon: no matter what kind of interpretation those critics give in their essays, all
of them begin their reasoning with a paradox in the novelthe novel does say something that is
significant but it expresses that in a style that cancels out the key point that it wants to make. For
LeClair, as the subgenre in each successive part of White Noise is repeatedly overlapped and
covered over by other subgenres, the form of the novela loop framed by consistent destructions
and reconstructions of genres in White Noisenot only blurs our understanding of what this novel
means, but also uncovers a possibility of newness resulted from the circular fluidity of its structural
loop. But, Boxall, by associating the title of the novel, White Noise, with its heraldwhite
noise, which refers to the dead time experienced in the air travelprophesied in The Names,
contends that White Noise, given that its thematic preoccupation with the end of time is cast in a
narrative temporality that is frozen for its non-circular porperties, makes itself the very embodiment
of dead time and thus, rather ironically, carries a critical potential for the probing of a
counter-narrative of history. Yet, for Hoberek, White Noise, because of its deployment of a
hybridized formal strategya minimalist narrative that is at the same time both a trauma narrative
and a postmodern fictionreveals its implicit concerns with the trauma of history, while
challenging any given mode of strict categorization that pits its form against its content, grand
history against the banality of the everyday life. Accordingly, regardless of how that paradox is
posed in the novelby repetitive replacements of genre, a narrative about and of dead time and
correspondences to three literary styles, for all three critics, White Noise delivers more than a
structural paradox which empties the significance of the novel by turning its presentation into what
it doesnt present. Namely, while presentation in White Noiselike subgenre, the narrative time or

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hybridized formal strategyseems to tell what the novel signifies by its apparent linguistic
organization and references but cancels out its signification through the use of incongruous
expression that highlights the disparity between its form and contents, this paradox doesnt exhaust
those critics interpretations. Though none of them can clearly explain what that paradox means in
DeLillos work, all notice the vacuum of reference in its perplexing narrative. As what they describe
in their essayssuch paradox makes this novel a loop, dead time and a hybridization of
genresreveal their determination to abstract a meaning out of the aggregate of incongruous
meanings that each separate actions or events seem to suggest to them, those descriptions of theirs
manifest those critics incapacity to fully grasp what the structural paradox that they find in
DeLillos White Noise may mean. To put it differently, whereas a loop, dead time and a
hybridization of genres include that paradox in the circularity, motionlessness and chiastic
combination of the novels temporal or genre structure, they provide no explanations about why
DeLillo chooses to focus on and play with genre, time and other formal strategies to formulate this
paradox. Thus, the interpretations those critics proffer stand for their apprehensions about how that
the novel registers, through the divorce of form and content, a structural paradox that is the
trademark of the postmodern era; at the same moment, these interpretations also delineate the
limitations of these critics own ideological stancesnone of them is able to explain why this kind
of structural paradox has become a norm, rather than an exception, of our time, the so-called
postmodern era.
However, a possibility for an interpretative breakthrough can be glimpsed in those critics
arguments. Like what they point out in their essaysthat paradox manifests a possibility of
newness, a critical potential and a political resistance, such conclusions they arrive at not only
expose their failure to find a critical language to present that paradox in its own term, but also
demonstrate their attitudes toward domesticating or homogenizing the white noise disrupting the
narrative movement of the novel at every turn of the chapter, with every shift towards a new

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situation, which newness ends up being the repetition of the same, with a subtle, though significant,
difference. That is, on the one hand, although each critic has his own perspective to comprehend
and articulate that paradox, none does try to name it with a new and exclusive term directly. Even
they do perceive the singularity of that paradox; they, rather than focusing on its paradoxical
uniqueness, they take up existing interpretative framework or language to analogize and substitute
that singularity. Such evasion uncovers both those critics limits of language and inabilities not only
to define but also to imagine DeLillos white noise. On the other hand, regardless of their efforts
to translate that paradox into some kind of possibilityontological or epistemological this novel
carries out such as being a loop or manifesting its critical potentiality through its form, we could
discover that such positive affirmation is only another evasion. While they see both contradiction
and singularity unmasked by that paradox, all critics straightaway categorize this uniqueness into so
abstract a term, possibility, in an attempt to cover up their failure to either to name it or to fathom
what that paradox means.
It should now be clear that all three critics offer perceptive readings of DeLillos White Noise.
However, due to their inability to phrase that structural paradox they find in the novel in their own
language, those critics turn their focus onto depicting and analogizing that paradox instead of
concentrating on figuring out what that means. Even through interpretations that make that paradox
a loop bearing a possibility of newness, dead time with a critical potential and a hybridization of
genres carrying a political possibility, critics impose a conceptual grid on the nameless and
unrepresentable white noise that DeLillo tries to articulate in his novel by drawing up a series of
figurative analogies. Thus, as these critics try to interpret the paradox they find in this novel, they
try to reintegrate this structural incongruity back into the narrative unity of DeLillos White Noise.
Inasmuch as they depict that as contradictions between form and contents in this work, critics
cannot help but attempt to find another general image or universal trope either to symbolize or to
signify this incongruity. In the following, however, I will draw upon Hoffmanns notion of

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situationalism to argue that the way to do some sort of justice to a postmodern novel like White
Noise is to engage a situated reading of its structural incongruity and, rather than always trying to
fit each event to a universal or general interpretative framework, to read it as a contingent
expression of the fleeting time caught in a localized space.

Situationalism for Multiplicity

Though White Noise is doubtlessly a postmodern work, its not regarded as an examplar of
postmodernism but as a meditation on postmodernity (Duvall 117). While its not a fiction that
illustrates Linda Hutcheons so-called the poetics of postmodernismboth a way of speakinga
discourseand a cultural process involving the expressions of thought that penetrate a novel with
the metalinguistic contradiction of being inside and outside, complicitous and distanced, inscribing
and contesting its own provisional formulations (14, 21), White Noise, though it showcases neither
the reflexivity of metafiction nor the problem of representing the past (Duvall 117), is not
poetically postmodern in Hutcheons sense. That is, since a poetics of postmodernism is a poetics of
a historiographic metafiction (5), DeLillos fiction fails to fit this definition. Nevertheless, Duvall
still opts to see it as a postmodern fiction for it pertains to postmodernity in its treatment of issues
such as media culture or advertising as it embraces those products of postmodern as its subject
matter (117).
Yet, in spite of the fact that it does not seem to fit the general features of the poetics of
postmodernism described by Hutcheon, White Noise isnt merely a novel which reflects the
cultural situation of the postmodern world in its narratives (Duvall 290). While the indeterminate
signification of this fiction, conjured up by the discrepant effects of the inconsistency between form
and contents, exposes an artistic freedom so that the modes of traditional expression in its
narration are challenged (Childs and Fowler, Postmodernism 185, 186), White Noise
demonstrates a characteristic of the poetics of postmodernism; that is, it evinces a deep skepticism

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of the adequacy of any essential or general laws that can fully explain how writing can possibly
function or operate in this era of postmodernism (Poetics 179; Sim, Postmodernism 289).
Namely, while this novel seems to present a nebulous signification through its transient narrative
foci and suggest some apparent themes through its deliberate narrative designs, White Noise reveals
itself in a double movement that encodes and decodes the events and actions in the narrative at the
same time; better still, White Noise moves along two parallel trajectories: on the one hand, each
given chapter describes events suggestive of thematic imports; on the other hand, each successive
event or action promises a thematic interpretation that moves towards a direction that does not
cohere or resonate with the thematic possibilities activated by events described in previous chapters.
In a way, in White Noise, the narrative does move, but it does not move towards any given direction;
rather, it moves towards several possible thematic possibilities. With such a mutually cancelling
nature in its narration, DeLillos work not just uncovers its sceptical or even curious states of being
an extended narrative that encloses characters, plot, milieu and so on (Novel 226). It unmasks
its postmodern features. Therefore, regardless of its irrelevance to the kind of poetics of
postmodernism described by Hutcheon, White Noise, with a poetics expressive of its skepticism
about the temporal movement of poetic representation, is nevertheless poetically postmodern. Yet,
even as we may read White Noise as a postmodern fiction with a correspondent poetics, how could
such understanding help us interpret White Noise productively?
For Hoffmann, situationalism offers an answer for us to better understand White Noise. While,
to Hoffmanns view, this is a term that accounts for discontinuity, incoherence, and immanence
and for a fact that language is localized (105), situationalism represents an episteme of
postmodernism, which exemplifies the drastic and radical changes happened to the common
structure of knowledge[t]he dominance of the field of experience over the subject of
experience, the separation of this field [of experience] into isolated situations, and then the
abandonment of a good sequence of these [isolated] situations, of bonds of causality and logic

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(105). That is, as the measure of reality in postmodern time is substituted by a field of experience,
rather than by an experiencing subject, in which men are defined by the different situations they
are in and the way they perceive them (105; 108), Hoffmann quotes Frederic Jameson to say that
situationalism reveals the fact that our entire contemporary social system has begun to live in a
perpetual present and in a perpetual change (qtd. in 106). Whats more, this oxymoronic
knowledge of time as both frozen and fluid, with its emphasis on temporal seriality characterized
by its immanence (of the situation) and indeterminacy (of connections) (106), influences other
disciplines to re-define human subjectpsychoanalysis finds true subjectivity in the
undeterminable and unnamable fluid structure of the unconscious (108); sociology looks into the
self that is produced from a scene that comes off (109); and, to N. Katherine Hayles, a chaos
theorist, she considers the components of human experience as social constructions
(110)denatured natural facts of life (110).
To Hoffmann, situationalism, exemplified by the rejections of wholeness and unity whose
conceptual formulations are influenced by specific historical developments, constructs the ground
for new ways of expression. Given that the contemporary paradigm of knowledge is governed less
by certainty than by uncertainty (111), this paradigm shift also clears space for the emergence of a
kind of writing that experiments with an ambivalently situational structure in an undifferentiated
flow of time (111). As such, narration itself, rather than characters or events, becomes the driving
force of the narrative, prompting and activating a situational transformation of meaning in the
postmodern novel, a transformation that is both caused by and responsive to the transformation of
contingent situations (116).
Having already described how, in the postmodern era, the logic of situationalism infiltrates into
every disciplines of the social sciences as well as the humanities, Hoffmann then proceeds to posit
that given that narrative is, by definition, a situational transformation of meaning (116), it
necessarily has to reconstruct what [its narrative] deconstructs in a sequence of situations (116).

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Two significant implications ensue from this observation: on the one hand, what matters in a
postmodern narrative is thus the situated experience itself, rather than the experiencing subject;
on the other, an in-between area is then opened up by the simultaneous movement both towards
deconstruction and reconstruction. This in-between area, Hoffmann insists, marks not only a
vacuum but offers new possibilities, too, for, in a curious twist of logic, in the emptiness of this
in-between, in the absence of absolute significance, a new fullness with new significations can
gather (116). This in-between space, however, it is important to bear in mind, is not actually a
spatial concept, for it connotes, to borrow a phrase from Gilles Deleuze, a line of flight, a force of
becoming. As situationalism aims at creating spaces of in-between though conflicts between our
reading experiences of the texts and our understanding of, or transformation by, its logic (117), it
rips the text open to expose a newness of meaning, which is more than an absence of meaning and
less than the presence of an absolute significance. That is to say, situationalism deconstructs any
predetermined principle of presentations and invites us to participate in the process of meaning
constructions, given that the text itself, with its irreducibility to any given doctrine, calls for this
inventive and creative participation on the readers part.
Though so far we might have a rough idea about situationalism and its cultural roots, how does
it work in narratives and what kind of narration does it give rise to? Hoffmann claims that situation
is the basic unit of fiction by positing two definitions. First, a fictioncomposed by isolated and
localized situations which are reconnected into a continuity of timeis a situational
transformation of (anti-)meaning or a narrated constant (118). Second, situationalism, which is
concerned about both the formation and deformation of situations (118), is one narrative strategy
that deconstructs coherence or continuity of a narration. So, as situation synthesizes a part of
narrative with elements such as character, plot or theme in the prescribed form (119), it, more
than images that offer sensory contents only, provides actual materialsspace, time, character,
action/event (119)about a part of narrative in a fiction and a portion of the story. Yet, Hoffmann

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claims, the situation in fiction is double-poled (120). It is constituted by both form as order and
force as disorder (120). As form, the situation forms a context whose componentsspace, time
and so oncomprise a totalized structure such that (dis)connections to former or later situations
could be made. To Hoffmann, the situation as form acts like a frame (121). Since it proffers both
natural and social frameworksspace, time, a background for understanding characters wills and
aimsto readers, the situation as form is a constituting principleor centerment (121)in any
narration. As for force, Hoffmann explains, it dispossesses form, frame, and fixities while it turns
the situation into transience and energy (123). That is, compared to form that encloses its
components in a given structure, force is the created thing that is simultaneously contained in
form and also (qtd. in 124), Hoffmann quotes Deleuze to say, overspills form by the materiality
of movement (qtd. in 125). As such, force is a paradox that defines the narrated situation as well
as the interaction of situations and the organization of the whole text (124). Therefore, given that
narrative situation encompasses both form and forcestasis and mobilityin its open structure
(118), Hoffmann takes situation as the structural paradigm of postmodern fiction. While the
postmodern fiction infuses doubt into its narrative by presenting a sequence of situations with no
meaning and order, it calls question to the expressed import of its expression but still keeps on
giving expression to that which is inevitably to be deconstructed.
To put it differently, even though postmodern novel attempts to question the hierarchies,
fixities and definites that function merely to safeguard the certainty of universal truththe
logical, the real (129), the dissolution of absolute truth which its narrative aims to produce is set
into motion by the play of this paradoxa conceptual control that includes the lack of control
(133). It thus follows that postmodern writers self-consciously play with the paradoxical interplay
between form and force (132), which exposes both their awareness and deployment of form that
aims at enclosing a story in its situational narration but with their self-reflexive and creative play
with tension and fusion, with simultaneity and sequentiality without final synthesis (133). So, for

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Hoffmann, as variable perspectives in a continuous stream of situations reign postmodern fiction,

the theme in those texts becomes representation not of world and self but of this paradoxical
constellation of disorder and order (144). The situation, expressive of its fluidity and multiplicity
in the enclosure of form and force that structures force and de/reconstructs it, manifests its
paradoxical property as a possibility. In postmodern fiction, since the paradox of the situation
presents an uncertainty that nothing can be grasped in its situational state, possibility of creation
rather than a simple emptiness is exposed. As the singularity of this statebeing a narrative form
that is irreducible to a theme but expressive of its transient formexcites the reader to interpret it
by freely connecting to some other reference in a story, situationalism that drives us to disconnect
and reconnect with other situations at our will not just displays the process of creation that reader
takes a part in, but also exposes what this singularity means to us.
Now that situationalism, as discussed above, is the representative narrative style adopted in
postmodern fiction, Hoffmann asserts, activating a situated symbolic mode to interpret those
works will be a must. That is, as the gap between understanding and the lack of understanding is
opened up by the incongruity between intelligible form and indeterminable force in postmodern
work, to read those fictions as symbols is to fill gaps of knowledge that cannot be filled by rational
explanation (144), or to suture such gaps by incorporating them to a secondary signifier (145).
With such reconstruction that turns postmodern works into symbols and relates those signified gaps
to other referents, readers can implant a judgmental, generalizing significance in those texts while
theyre able to attach their valuations and perspectives to their own readings (145). In other words,
since the literary symbol, so Hoffmann explains, carries three componentsthe vehicle, a
narrated and representational entity; the tenor, meanings; [t]he specific relation between vehicle
and tenor (146), it, like the situation in narrative, encompasses one structure that is conditioned by
its components whose interrelations among each other provide meanings.
To Hoffmann, though it is a formal model of signification (146), the symbol is structured in

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an open form that readers can read from its configuration or through their associations due to the
versatility provided by its complex composition. While its structure may lead readers to find a
meaning extrinsic or intrinsic to the vehicles, this discovery, regardless its being an
oversimplification, implies that the three components of a symbol will offer readers different
perspectives to read the symbol. Therefore, for Hoffmann, the symbol, with the openness in its
composition, proffers readers a way to cross over the gap presented in postmodern fiction on the
one hand. On the other hand, while it makes readers to approach the void opened up by the gap
through the reconstruction of the symbol (144-45), the symbol, as the situation that frees force
from form and rebuilds a new one, discloses the lack of substitutes for the gap (145). That is,
whereas a symbolization is a means for making up for a deficit of meaning (147), its an
assimilative activity that a capacity to explain and to represent the gap will be fulfilled by
suggestions of symbolic thinking (147). Put it differently, as to symbolize is to grasp the absent,
the ungraspable in the fiction (147), Hoffmann asserts, it presents a paradox readers facetheyre
unable to get to the place the gap occupies due to its emptiness; but, theyre still able to approach
the gap if they follow the structure of it and symbolize that movement to approximate the gap.
Thus, to sum up, while situationalism in the postmodern novel exposes a series of
transformations of situations that let form and force interplay and decenter its narrative with its
obvious reflexivity, symbolization, proffering readers the chance to access texts, discloses readers
(in)ability to grasp the gap, or in-betwenness, between the play of form and form in any given
situation. As situationalism opens up a possibility of newness by disclosing apparent conflict
between form and force in the narrative, the absence of meaning and order exposed by the
paradoxical narration seems to express what this text means. Yet, this evident paradox instead
prompts readers to find what this text signifies. That is to say, readers try to cross that gap of
understanding in a metaphorical way (159)they interpret it through their perspectives
according to a similarity in structure between the two (160), which hence stimulates them to

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adopt their imaginations and creative acts to connect form with force. Such a process of
signification which involves situational presentations and readers participations, in a word,
manifests a characteristic postmodern featureboth comprehension of ones failure of control and
attempt to regain control; so, situationalism is simultaneously deconstructive (in its narration) and
reconstructive (in its interpretation) (162).
Therefore, unlike the interpretative methods deployed by LeClair, Boxall and Hoberek in their
analyses of White Noise, situationalism is not really an interpretative method. It is a perspective that
attempts to connect postmodern culture with one specific kind of narrative form. As those critics
aim at explaining White Noise through images that both depict and represent the paradox brought by
the presentation of that which cannot be represented in its narrative, situationalism shows us a
position to freely engage with a text. By emphasizing on a literary form whose stylistic features
corresponds to those of postmodernitydiscontinuity, immanence and uncertainty, situationalism
not only performatively enacts our understandings about this kind of narrative: there is a gap left by
a paradox between its static form and transient contents, but it also incites us to participate in a
process of creating its meaning through the symbolization of this gap. Even though we understand
that it is impossible for us to fully grasp what a fiction means thanks to the gap in its narrative,
through this ongoing process of symbolization we instead discover new possibilities that open up
for us to activate multiple possible interpretations. Situationalism gives any of us a way to approach
a work and to use our imaginations to create meanings.
Yet, although LeClair, Hoberek, Boxall, and Hoffmann are all concerned about activating the
process of ongoing symbolization in their own acts of interpretation; Hoffmanns situationalism
isnt as limited as the interpretative methods adopted by the first three critics. Since situationalism
grounds itself on a premiseits foci on a narrative form that corresponds to postmodernity and that
rejects any unified wholeness, it is not an evasion intended to replace ones inability to phrase and
explain the paradox in a fiction by a seeming positive saying about the false possibility of the

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paradox. Contrariwise, situationalism is an affirmation that relates the paradoxical narrative to

postmodern culture where its bred. Instead of upholding a vague possibility based on the
uncoverings of vague references in a novel, it, unlike what the first three critics do, examines,
confronts, and responds to the influences brought by postmodern culture first and then embraces the
possibilities exposed by the evolving episteme of postmodernism. So to speak, Hoffmann sets up a
different and much more positive way of interpreting White Noise. Whereas his way lays its foci on
postmodernity and a possibility of multiple meanings we readers bring through our symbolization,
situationalism demonstrates naivet that is even more positive than the kind of possibility those
critics raisewe readers can still grasp what a paradoxical work means regardless of the possibility
that we cant truly cross the gap that work presents.

Toward The End of Time

In this chapter, starting from a brief introduction about why White Noise is aporetic in its
narrative presentations, I have discussed the reason why its perplexing in its meaningthere are
two dimensions of expression contradicting to each other. While chronological narrative form in
this novel doesnt guarantee the thematic unity of its contents, those described events dont
completely go out-of-the-joint of time in White Noise, either. Contrariwise, various and unrelated
events in this novel prompt us to read it through the multiplicity they carry; their sequence on the
same time axis restrains us from explaining it without noticing its unity though. Such paradox
caused by the discrepancy between form and contents in White Noise entraps our attentions to the
grid of either-oreither unity or multiplicity. Besides, it also makes us wonder whether this work
denotes something or not. I also further my discussions on such paradox of meaning with
explorations of two dissimilar interpretative ways. Firstly, from essays wrote by LeClair, Boxall and
Hoberek, I discover an ideological inclination in their readings. While they all begin their essays
from the paradox brought by the presentation of that which is unpresentable in White Noise, they

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aim at depicting how that paradox is molded and then replacing it with the possibility of newness or
critical/political potentials. Rather than name and explain that paradox straightaway, these critics
attempt to cover their incapacity to catch and explicate that paradox in a disguise of affirming what
they dont know. Then, I turn to another waysituationalismwhich Hoffmann deliberates in his
study of postmodernism. Unlike those critics interpretations that set out to explain away the
paradox in White Noise, situationalism directly binds that kind of narrative to the alleged ethos of
the postmodern culture. Proceeding from the self-conscious and self-reflexive premise characteristic
of postmodernitythe approaching to and filling in the gap between form and content is both
necessary and impossible, situationalism shows us another possible way of interpreting White
Noiseby the activation of an ongoing and creative process of symbolization, various readers can
participate in and multiple meanings can thus be gathered. From this possibility of multiplicity,
situationalism proffers another kind of positive affirmation: readers can still embrace possibilities of
creation that the process of symbolization brings regardless of their incapacity to fully grasp the
meaning of this novel.
So, to sum up, by critically reviewing the four critics approaches towards a postmodern work
like White Noise, I would like to point out one shared tendency hidden in their diverse arguments.
No matter which focus they rest on in their discussionsto interpret the work as a signification of a
unity or multiplicity, all four critics attempt to enclose the multiplicity of symbolization to specific
images. Yet, I argue, in some way, such affirmations do not explain the paradox White Noise
includes in its narrative. By either replacing that paradox with what they cant even describe or
connecting that to the postmodern culture, both try to cover the fact that they cannot ascertain what
such paradox is. Even situationalism which seemingly exposes a different attitude from what those
critics have practiced still clings to the belief that readers do know their distances from real
understanding of that paradox. All of them nevertheless show their obsessions with upholding and
valorizing one singular interpretation about that paradox. I assert, instead of substituting that

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paradox with either a unified image or an aggregate of possible multiplicity, we shall directly
confront that paradox. That is, since that paradox is brought by the contradictions between form and
contents in White Noise, we shall return to this starting point and figure out what causes this
self-opposition. This will return us to articulate the paradoxical postmodern sense of time.
In White Noise, whereas both form and contents pertain to presentations about timethe
narrative form that arranges events in a chronological order and the contents that present a series of
stories in a logically inconsistent plot, the paradox is caused by DeLillos juxtaposition of two
senses of time. Namely, as White Noise describes what occurred to Jack in one year, noncausality
among events seems to cancel the assimilative effect brought up by its chronological narrative; yet,
the novel is still read by most critics as a sensible story that refers to some postmodern cultural
phenomena Jack meets in his life, though the nonsequnetiality among each occurrence seems to
make the story unintelligible. Such contradiction that twists opposite expressions of form and
contents in White Noise into an intelligible story contains two incompatible senses of timeone
absorbed by the linearity of time and another released by the exigency of the linearity of time. The
former signifies the causal unity that time as duration embodies; the latter relates to spots of time
that time as each sporadic moment manifests. Therefore, White Noise, through its presentation of
two paradoxical senses of time, is infused with various interpretative possibilities composed by
several conceptual pairs: parts and unity, multiplicity and oneness, and moment and duration. While
the story is narrated in a chronological sequence with a start and an end, and is expected to present
one theme within its causation, the irrelevance among each event makes all happenings on that
timeline become contingent and even everyday-like. Contrariwise, each of them may be a
significant part of the plot as well due to its inclusion in the unity of this story. So to speak, by such
combinations of two senses of time, I contend, White Noise not merely displays a paradoxical sense
of time, but it also demonstrates the end of time in its narrative movement. On the one hand, it
cannot be denied that each event has actually happened in the narrative, but, given its random,

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contingent, and incomplete nature, each event is marked with an aura of yet-to-be-resolved-ness. In
this sense, each happening in this story is both an event occurred in the past and a not-yet-resolved
event whose potential import is yet to be actualized in the time to come. In other words, each event
is simultaneously a happening that can be assimilated into a story with a beginning and ending, and
one that is not yet finished and thus out-of-joint within the temporal framework of the story. Like a
dj vu and a prophecy that both relates to its precedence and its sequel simultaneously, this sense
of end of time seems to give the narrated event a universal propertyit had already occurred for
it is like an everyday event and it will occur in the future as well. Whats more, since it disallows
any closure in the novel, such end of time not only makes White Noise lose its critical momentum,
but also imbues this work with an intense atmosphere of playing innocent. That is to say, the
paradox brought by the conflict between its form and contents in DeLillos novel is unlike what
critics interpret it to be: for displaying some kind of possibility. Rather, it presents an innocence
aimed at rejecting the critique directed at what Jack observes in his narration. To sum up, given that
narratives play with the end of time, as it perfomatively enacts two contradictory sense of time,
the narrative gains an ongoing life by innocently refusing to end time. In other words, the innocence
of White Noise is that its narrative can stop at any time but it can also live on ad infinitum. Such is
the end of the time that DeLillo plays with; such is the strength and also the weakness of his
groundbreaking novel, White Noise.

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Chapter Two
Natural History

There must be something, somewhere, large and

grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining
reliance and implicit belief.
White Noise (154)

In White Noise, death, like a sound that Jack hear[s] forever (198), incessantly haunts
Jack. To him, the questionWho will die first? (15)always comes up to his mind. As that
doubt about who is to die emerges, he thinks about nothing but sadness and fear that haunts the
survivors (15). That is, since death is what he cannot experience as long as hes still alive, he could
only imagine what those who are left behind would feel. Once, while Jack discusses this question
with his wife Babette, both of them contend that he/she wants to die first. To either Jack or Babette,
no matter he/she would feel unbearably lonely or miserably incomplete without the other (100),
the reason why he/she desires to die first is because he/she intends to escape from being left
alone and facing a hole in space and time (100, 101).
To Jack, facing the death of the loved one reminds him of three things. First, given that the
death of another leaves a hole which occupies real space-time, death is then perceived as a
deprivation that has material consequences that affect the ontological integrity of his being. Second,
not only that is a deprivation that, as such, marks the finitude of beings, as a limit it is also an
invisible but existential lack which, rather ironically, also completes his life. Finally, as Jack doesnt
want to be left alone, or, better still, as he dreads being left alone, this unwillingness or dread
exposes his fear about living on. This emptiness and cosmic darkness of death discourages
Jack from looking at it face-to-face (100). Thus, in Jacks view, death is an experience in three

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senses. On the one hand, its a must and a dread; that is to say, its a knowable and an unknownable
thing that signifies both completion and lack of life. Yet, more importantly, death is seen as an
experience in time, as what upsets and even terrifies Jack, it can be said, death connotes the
unpredicatability of time. However, in White Noise, death is not only opposed to life, to the
vanishing of life, but also to artificiality, or the vanishing of authenticity.
For Jack, death is not merely what no one knows (196); its also a great universal subject
(196). Inasmuch as the fear of death is a condition that marks the humanity of human beings as well
as that sets humans apart from unthinking and unfeeling animals (195), Jack has always thought of
death as a knowable limit which makes human the highest form of life on earth (99). In other
words, given that death is a final line, a border or limit (229), its finality, rather ironically, is what
renders a precious texture to life (228). On the one hand, like a boundary which separates the
living from the dead, death manifests two forms of life to human: existent and non-existent. On the
other hand, it places being in time so that a sense of presence, a sense of living, is formed in its
existential distinction-making. Therefore, as there is nothing which is more underlying than death
(197), death bespeaks both biological truth which demands no explanation and a watershed in time
between a before and an after, a living and a living-on. If, as Winnie Richards, a biomedical
scientist who analyzes Dylar for Jack, so says in the conversation she has with him about death, it is
death that gives life a sense of definition and beauty and meaning (228, 229), then it can be said
that death draws out a difference and sets it apart from life. Rather than shying away from death and
even form[ing] a shield against their own dying (73), Winnie insists that it is a mistake to lose
ones sense of death, even ones fear of death (228). Hence, in a word, death is both real and
synthetic (240). Its a simple fact of non-being; its an abstract label at the same time.
Nevertheless, whilst Jack converses with one of his colleagues Murray Jay Siskind, he speaks
out aloud his feeling toward deathfear. To him, since death is both what people have to face and
what people couldnt be intelligent about (282), Jack resents the sense of finality that death signifies

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(283). He complains that he couldnt figure out why we cant live a hundred and fifty years given
that [t]heres no scientific reason to prove human cant live forever (283). That is to say, for Jack,
underlying his fear of death is his desire to live (283). As what he faces is the unknownability of
death, he could do nothing but pretend that [death] isnt there (285). Yet, in Jacks mind,
[n]othing is stronger than death (284). He couldnt repress his fear from either believing in the
solace of an afterlife or in the power of technology (285-86). Thus, this deadlockas he cant help
but be conscious of the threat that death posesmakes Jack helpless and fearful (288). To him, the
reason why death is threatening is not because life would be incomplete without it. Rather, its
because death is what makes [life] incomplete (284). Put this in other words, Jack is caught in a
loop. On the one hand, he claims that he doesnt fear what death makes life become, for he fears
what death is. On the other hand, death is nothing but what marks the end of time and what signifies
the nothingness of life. As such, Jack is obsessed with placing a hold to life; that is, with arresting
life in time.

Remnants or Living on
If the thought of death is linked to and tied up with the effort to arrest life in time, technology
provides the means to allow humans to arrest life and to live in forms that are perhaps not authentic
in Kants eyes. In White Noise, modern technology not only permeates the very fibers of everyday
life, but modern technology also redefines lifeas well as deathin its most fundamental aspects.
For example, the three ramifications of modern technology highlighted for discussion in this novel,
namely, the coupling of consumerism with the media, the fatality of toxic chemical exposures, and
miraculous power of biomedical science, all are concerned with the inauthentification, destruction,
or prolonging of life. Death, however, does not become less of a cause of anxiety simply because of
the advancement in modern technology. Instead, Jack is besieged with a choice between loneliness
and death (102).

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In other words, he feels bored and lonely. What is loneliness if its not an effect that takes one
over when one experiences an altered sense of time? Out of his boredom, or loneliness, he flirts
with the nature of plots, power of the [German] language, or even routine things, so that he
may escape from the seizure of time (26, 31, 248). It can thus be said that, in DeLillos novel, death
is not merely an idea that exhorts Jacks emotional responses, but death is an omnipresent but
imminent presence that profoundly influences his will to act (or not to act). While Jack repetitively
turns his reminiscence to the glitters that once seem to have surrounded him during his days of
comfort, his thoughts inevitably drift to those moments in time when he is certain of the materiality
and finitude of his being in time. For example, he describes his wife as an ample woman who is in
touch with her body. Babette, whatever she is doing, makes me feel sweetly rewarded, bound up
with a full-souled woman, a lover of daylight and dense life (5). Babette makes him anchored in
the materiality of the everyday, for she is unlike his former wives, who had a tendency to feel
estranged from the objective worlda self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the
intelligence community (6). What is so curious in this passage, I argue, is not the fact the Jack
prefers Babette, an earthly woman who takes care of her family and the elderly people in their
neighborhood, to the other wives that Jack used to have, who are intellectuals; what needs to be
addressed is why Jack finds it important that he should be bound up with Babette whose daily
routine is not intellectual discussion but shopping and watching TV. Is it possible that Jack finds
everyday life so alienating that he needs Babette to anchor him in time and space so that he can fend
off the dreadful feeling that sometimes assaults him when he, while he is sleeping in his brass
bed, thinks he hears a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at
the edge of a dream (4). Put it differently, the earthliness of Babette assures him, helping him to
fight against the feeling that he, in living an inauthentic life, is almost already dead. It is fair to
say that this remote and steady murmur that he hears is nothing else but the white noise that
gives the novel its title.

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This does not mean that Jack is not making strenuous efforts to energize his life to screen off
the white noise; that is, to repress his fear that he is living an inauthentic and creaturely life. As an
academic who is searching for a niche to anchor himself, he invented Hitler studies (4). As the
head of the family, he takes prides in being the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses,
bribes, baksheesh (84), and, as a consequence, he derives tremendous pleasure from shopping, for,
as he shops, he finds himself grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects
of myself, located a person Id forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me (84). It does not
matter how much money he spends in shopping, for the money he spent came back to me in the
form of existential credit (84). Shopping and consumption, in other words, energizes him and helps
him locate his lost self. Similarly, while he is with his children whom he describes as children
who are full of life, carrying fully charged waves of identity and being with them (103), he feels
he has gained life-credit (290).
Even though both shopping and being with his earthly wife Babette and his energy-packed
children do help him to gather himself, and to piece together fragments of his lost self, all these
everyday activities that he does with his family not only returns him to a life he has lost, but they
also leave behind codes and messages that the life that he makes strenuous efforts to live is
undead in every sense of the word (103). Yet, rather ironically, precisely because of his strenuous
efforts to live a life that is undead, he proves himself almost always affected, if not contaminated,
by trace of the inhuman, unnatural, death-like specters of the others. In a way, DeLillo portrays
consumerism that is wrapped up with media and other forms of technology, as the very vehicle
which allows Jack to transcend the finitude of his being as he is still caught in timehe still lives
his life day after day. However, even though Jack seems to put much more emphases on describing
what generates life forces in his daily experiences, the events that bring him actually into
confrontation with the human finitude and with the fact that he is but the product of dead capital are
not everyday crises but calamities that unexpectedly befall him and then change the very course of

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his life. The two events that puncture Jacks rather innocent sense of his invincibility from death are
respectively the airborne toxic event and his wrathful confrontation with the drug dealer, Willie
Mink, who has an affair with his wife. These two events are indeed the engines that drive the plot of
this story. As both arent the quotidian events that people experience in their daily life, those two
events that nearly lead Jack to meet his own death demonstrate not only how death permeates and
defines everything in this novel but how fragile and porous ones subjectivity is.
For critics such as Jonathan F. Bassett, Marc Schuster and Mark Osteen, death is analogous
with or epitomizes a sort of disappearance in White Noisethe death of Jacks selfinduced by
the postmodern condition. Bassett draws upon Ernest Becker and Robert Jay Liftons ideas, a
necessary madness, to examine and understand difficult notion of death presented in DeLillos
work. Death, for Becker and Jay, is an unknown enigma which drives one to either merge with
larger cultural structures or stand out as exceptional and unique so that one can reduce ones
anxiety caused by [the] existential paradox that haunts one as one is caught in between ones
symbolic and physical existence. As one struggles to decide whether one should be flexible in the
face of ambiguity and change or maintain a sense of self grounded in a framework of cultural
meaning, one oscillates between two notions of the selfone as the subject of his/her own life or
one as the object of the culture that one inhabits. Although Jack neither secures immortality of his
symbolic existence by his attempt to avert death nor utterly loses the ability to preserve that
existence in an age when technological advances fragment ones experiences, in the novel, Jack, no
matter how mad or protean he is, disappears, at least in the sense of his allowing consumerism,
technology and mass media to monopolize the formation of his subjectivity.
By taking up Jean Baudrillards analysis of consumerism, Schuster interprets White Noise as
both an illustration of modern mans alienation from the real world and from the others, an
alienation that is caused by the mechanism of consumer ideology which incessantly transforms
beings into things and commodities. Shuster, in his reading, tries to flesh out the possibility of

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resisting the thing-making ideology of capitalism. Whereas the so-called subject has no power
to alter consumer ideologyeither its form or its contentand can only fall into line as an object
within the system because of [o]ur absolute faith in the notion of value (12, 26), Jack is, in a
figurative sense, more dead than alive, for not only does he believe in signs of value and nothing
else (29), but he also he replaces people with signs of value, notwithstanding his awareness that
there are still some unquantifiable perceptions as pain, loss, and disappointment that may still
verify his subjectivity or that of others (28). Nonetheless, Osteen argues that in White Noise,
DeLillo depicts Jack as performing a simulated self (171), for Jack cannot function as an
individual agent but is but an element of the system of capitalism (171). Osteen believes that the
deadening of Jacks selfhood is facilitated and brought about through the joint and accumulative
operation of three channelstelevision channels, consumer desires, and spiritual channels (166).
By repeatedly drawing the readers attention to how many diverse aspects of Jacks life are
invariably packaged in varied assemblages of commodities, Osteen proclaims, the novel aims to
provide a critique of the deadening effects of postmodern culture, especially the pernicious effects
of postmodern consumerism which not only operates as dead capital but also reduces humans into
dead commodities.
Therefore, in White Noise, death becomes flesh and bone of this story insofar as it is both a
structural element and a narrative force of this novel. While death pervades Jacks narrative in
various forms, the accumulation of all those forms in which death assumes its force further
reinforces the significance of deathdeath that symbolizes absence, disappearance, and ironically
also presence and omnipotencein this novel. Death, as the structural component and the thematic
feature at the same time, thus dictates that we take death as one of the white noises that Jack hears
and that haunts him; in this sense, death, or at least the fear of death, dominates and determines our
understanding of White Noise, especially in terms of the metaphysics of death that it articulateson
the one hand, how Jack treats death both as the deprivation of the physical and material properties

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of those persons he loves, including himself, and, on the other hand, he also treats death as a
property that is built into the structure of Jacks everyday life. That is, given that the idea of death is
interwoven into the novel, it assumes two different forms of expressions, thereby revealing the
discrepancy between these two notions of death. If death is seen as marking the finitude of being,
then one may either accept it or avoid it. In the former case, even when death is defined as absence,
the very presence of this absence is clearly described as a phenomenal limit that both restricts and
anchors Jacks life, itbeing either a possible existential form Jack may take or a solid event that
voids his existenceis a constitutive element that sets the basis for the story and fosters its
development. As I have previously mentioned, it is seen as a hole in space and time that makes
Jack learn his own limits (101). However, death in this work not only provokes his desires to avoid
it, it also elicits his wishes to nullify it by gaining life forces via consumption, technology, or
violence.
So, in White Noise, death bares the condition for story telling; it is a novel that details Jacks
many deadening responses to deathvia consumption, technology, or even via the use of violence.
Since Jack doesnt want to die and is so scared by it, its a key element that energizes the sequence
of his narrative as Jacks consciousness rivets around its threatening indefiniteness, simultaneously
approaching and receding from death. But, despite the centrality of death as a thematic issue in this
novel, death is not directly treated as a literal, physical, or corporeal figure; neither is death
personified as a character with either a psychological depth or physical properties, nor do any major
characters in this novel actually die. Instead, what terrifies is not death per se, but the fear of death.
From what Bassett, Schuster and Osteen proclaim in their essays, we can discover that deaththe
simultaneous presence of a simulated self and absence/disappearance of subjectivity caused by
the suffocating nature of postmodern cultureis what Jack fears. Moreover, he even works
strenuously to hide his fear behind the mask of performative innocence or staged invincibility. Quite
interestingly, Jack never explicitly signifies that his fear profoundly influences his acts in his

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first-person narration. Only through his struggle and obsession with death can the readers fathom
the depth of his anxiety. Meanwhile, however, Jacks first-person narrative is frequently punctuated
by the heterogeneous voices that invade into Jacks everyday lifehis living room, bedroom,
dining room, and even the supermarket that he frequentsvoices that seem to have acquired the
authority and the power to affect how Jack thinks and acts. For example, on the night of his staying
at the evacuation camp Jack is swept over by a feeling of desperate piety while watching over his
sleeping daughter Steffie and then hearing her mutter something in her sleep (154). Moments later
when she murmurs again, he then knows that she is not uttering dreamy murmur but rather she
utters two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have
a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica (154, 155). Jack then goes
on to speculate on the profound implications these two simple words may have:
A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth
only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with
looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in
cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be?.....Part of
every childs brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the
utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence. (emphasis
added 155)
A simple modern technological product such as Toyata Celica, even when it appears in the utterance
of an innocent child who move[d] her lips, attempting to match the words as they were spoken [on
TV] (84), in other words, has the power to deliver Jack to a realm of transcendence, to fend off his
fear of death at least by some kind of literal transcendent feeling brought up by the product. Yet, at
another occasion, technology is precisely that which drives him to lead a deadening and inauthentic
life. It is this sense of ambivalence that DeLillo plays out throughout his novel.
However, the thematic emphasis on technology as both cause of and salvation from death

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resonates with and supplements a thought-provoking paradox that functions on a formal levelthe
fear of death is simultaneously what motivates and structures Jacks narration and what he also tries
strenuously to disavow. As death is, like what I have said, both the presence of absence and the
absence of presence, it thus opens up two ways of comprehending the epistemology of existence:
ascertaining our existence by either reflexively negating what we are or naming it from our
accepted presumptions. As such, death is both affirmation and negation of our temporal state of
being. As a novel about the fear of death, DeLillos White Noise exposes modern peoples
contradictory views towards our existence, as well as towards how our existence becomes mediated
by technology. It exposes a hidden core that draws attention to both sides of our relation to what
death is or representswe are simultaneously attracted and repelled by death so that we both want
to capture it and are, in turn, caught by and in it. That is to say, whereas deathbeing what neither
occupies a substantial space nor signifies anything but itselfis the possible but impenetrable
existential condition of life to the living, how to give deaththis unrepresentable and impenetrable
thinga language, a plot, a form is a problem that Jack has to face and tackle with. Yet, in telling a
story about death for the sole purpose of stalling death, Jack risks translating it into something that
is knowable, even though it is only through such a necessarily reductive translation can Jack learn
to deal with and confront the threat of death.
Whereas Jack incessantly talks about death so as not to confront it, critics, in a similar vein,
approach Jacks ambivalent treatment of death by trying to give it a fixed and recognizable meaning.
Yet, death cannot be simply absorbed into ideas; rather death marks Jacks limit as a storyteller as
well as the urgency of the identity crisis that Jack faces. Jack may insist to believe that by dwelling
on the rituals of the everyday life, he is empowering himself and transcending death. He may think
that, with Steffies utterance of Toyota Celica, or, with the daily ritual of watching TV together
with his family, he is demystifying death, thereby translating it from a nebulous but scary notion
into a strong motivation to live a vigorous life. Yet, in the process of such substantiations or

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translations, death, through its conceptual structure that folds presence and absence into itself,
unfolds its mbius-strip-like structure. While in the novel it stimulates Jack to react to its
frightening obscurity by anchoring in and turning towards the concrete and the corporeal things in
life, thereby telling a story that follows the ritualistic and repetitive nature of the everyday life, the
critics earnest attempt to fault Jack for failing to deal with that which underlies death in his life,
like Bassett, Schuster and Osteens, I would argue, also exposes their own failures to see through
the Janus-face nature of deaththat is, death is both absence in presence and presence in absence.
If Jacks obsession with death implies his unconscious attempt to exile death from his life or to play
innocence to the threat of death, for critics, they fail to see how Jack deploys, performs, and stages
innocence in order to maintain his invincibility against death. They only observe what kind of death
Jack attempts to deal with; yet, they dont see what makes Jack being able, or think he is able to,
deal with death, a concept that one cannot truly conceptualize for his/her lack of experiences.
Death as both presence and absence bespeaks a temporal paradox, however. Whereas both Jack
and critics are obsessed with denuding death, by imposing an interpretative framework on the
impenetrable and unknowable thing that they call death, it can therefore be said that, in White Noise,
the kind of anxiety about capturing the concept of death expressed through Jacks direct narrating
and critics indirect interpretations exhibits the wish that is hidden beneath both DeLillo and the
critics theories about literary production, which is that death, like the other things such as social
fatigue or even human weakness, needs to be known and can be known. It is this desire to be
all-knowing and all-seeing which for me defines the American Innocence that brings Jack to confess
his American Dread, as if by so doing he can then, really and conclusively, realize his American
Dream.
In this chapter, to continue my explorations on innocence demonstrated in White Noise, I will
place my focus on death in this novel by following on the notion of the end of time I discuss in
Chapter One. Since the end of time that illustrates the paradoxical sense of time in DeLillos story

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bespeaks why there is no obvious critical target in White Noise, deathan idea that exhibits both
writer and reader/critics desire to fully show/grasp whats concealed behind presentationsis made
more complicated. That is, if repetitions of the end of time make each occurrence in this work
unresolved, thereby appearing either as dj vu or a prophetic utterance that ushers in the not-yet,
death that induces our wishes to ascertain it from its simultaneous presence and absence in narrated
events provides a new perspective for us to read White Noise. While deaththe end of beingis
repeatedly presented via repetitive ends of time, what does such paradoxical presentation that
includes both a desire to see and know all and a countering desire to see and know nothing? In the
following, by drawing on Walter Benjamin and Eric Santners explanations on natural history, I
attempt to discuss what the relations between death and the end of time signifies in this work. As
natural history, for these scholars, exposes a process that Idea is actualized in different forms on a
sequence of historical transitions, such Ideafor Benjamin, the truth, and for Santner,
neighbor-lovehints us to read the paradoxical presentation of the fear of death in White Noise in a
different light.
Both Benjamin and Santner see History as a narrative populated by the relics of the past.
History is a cycle of creation and disappearance, of life and death. The sequences of any narrative
are dictated not by the flow of sequential time but by an alternative time in which things in nature
die and then are given a second life in natural history. By delving into how narrative sequences are
put together into a narrative history, Benjamin and Santner intend to expose what motivates people
to give things in nature a second life. Given that both Benjamin and Santner believe that natural
history, or an archive of what Santner calls the creaturely life, reflects less what such life really is
but the stubborn insistence of people to take the creaturely life as the merely suspension of their
daily livesthe authentic life that is free from any form of restraint, I thus argue that this stubborn
belief registers a stance of innocence that I see in Jacks approach to lifeor death. As such, I will
analyze two major deathly events that Jack faces in this work to illustrate what I believe to be Jacks

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performative innocence.
For example, during the crisis of the airborne toxic event, as Jack talks to his panic-stricken
son who practically cried out to me in a voice charged with the plaintive throb of his special time
of life that they should flee (117), Jack declares, in a language that expresses his sense of
incredulous innocence that Im not just a college professor. Im the head of a department. I dont
see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. Thats for people who live in mobile homes out in the
scrubby parts of the country, where the fish hatcheries are (117). Such language reflects Jacks
confidence in his invincibilityhe is the exception from such disasters for disasters only happen to
people who live in mobile homes (117). To explain this, I will draw on what Henry F. May
describes as American innocence for to further explicate how such exceptional position is formed in
the later part of this chapter.

Natural History: Benjamin and Santner

In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, while reflecting on the cultural predicament he has
experienced as he is caught in between the emergence of the Weimar Republic and European
modernity, Benjamin returns to the past and finds that similar conundrums also beset the mourning
plays of the Baroque period. As a response, he even coins the term natural history to apply to this
much undervalued genre. To Benjamin, while both periodsboth the Baroque period and the
modern timeare plagued with similar problemsthe dissolution of the belief in progress and
humanism that the Enlightenment brings, he, noticing likeness in attitudes about life as expressed
in literature in both epochs (Steiner 63), attempts to flesh out correspondence between the
presentation of excessive violence, greed and brutality in the writings of both periods (Finkelde
47). Then, whereas Benjamins readingunlike former scholars that disregard the mourning plays
due to its generic deviations from established normsaffirms the singularity of the mourning play
by emphasizing on the melancholy shown in its deployment of stock images, Benjamin offers an

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alternative way of reading the mourning plays as natural history. Namely, as mourning plays are
affected by German Protestantism that mak[es] the secular-political sphere a testing ground for a
life (138), they also disclose, so writes Benjamin, days of the creation in the sequence of its
dramatic actions (91). So, Benjamin defines natural history as the life of the works and forms
which need such protection in order to unfold clearly and unclouded by human life (47). So doing,
he explicates why mourning play is melancholic, for, given that the mourning plays are populated
with dead materials such as corpse and martyred sovereign, the genre itself seems to suggest that
the product of the corpse is life (218).
Accordingly, the natural history, Benjamin asserts, registers two different senses in the natural
history which, as Benjamin asserts, needs to be protected by literary forms for it to be clearly
unfolded. Because of its presentations of the creaturely element and obsolete tendency of human
existence, it demonstrates how deadly images are arranged in the mourning plays. While those
deadly images repeatedly appear in the course of the dramatic acts of the plays, they, within the
course of the play that allegorizes the real-time history, allegorize natural history via expressing a
feeling hidden in the deadness of life, given that life cant help becoming stale (138). Besides,
such sense of melancholy also corresponds to the historical context mourning play appears. Thus,
Benjamins interpretation of the mourning play as natural history not only help us connect this kind
of literary genre with its historical contextthe melancholy aroused by the secularization of man
who loses his/her prestige guaranteed by the Enlightenment. Furthermore, such concept that focuses
on the idea delivered by the shaping force of the inevitable decay of nature instead also
underscores (Finkelde 61), in Benjamins view, how truth is displayed in works and forms of art
within the historical process as well. That is, as truthIdea, or the origin of ideasisnt
approachable but can only be grasped as the power which determines the essence of [its] empirical
reality (36), natural history, the sum of all such actualizations unpacked in the process of history,
explicates how in a process of restoration and reestablishment an artistic or literary presentation is

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only an imperfect and incomplete one among others (45). This immanent perspective of truth
exposes the possibility of creation concealed in narrative or artistic expressions. It also accentuates
the importance of allegory and the historicity of an idea. To Benjamin, given that an idea will
constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history
(45-46), historicity manifested in this process reminds us of the continued life of these works
(Steiner 72), while allegory shown as a potential can assist readers to discover a connection of
equivocal cross-reference among all presented ideas (72). So to speak, Benjamins concept of
natural history proffers us a way of interpretation that relates to two dimensions of a literary or
artistic workvia allegory we can read how a literary/artistic work is expressed through its
arrangement and how it is situated within its epoch or relates to other works.
Santner, by adopting a psychoanalytical point of view, borrows Benjamins idea natural
history to elucidate how a psychotheological approach can be used to further the understanding
of the literature (xi). To Santner, as natural history refers to the enigmatic signifiers left by the
exchange between natural and historical properties of a thing (17)a form of life that can persist
beyond the death of the symbolic forms that gave it meaning but is paradoxically sustained by
that symbolic forms that persist beyond the death of the form of life (17), it manifests [a]
space of undead that causes continuous breakdown and reification of the normative structures of
human life and mindedness within the course of time (17, 16). That is, such as the interaction
between mythic violence and sovereign jouissance in the realm of politics (65, 22), for
Santner, natural history is about the entanglement in successive repetitions of the rises and falls of
political power and of ongoing subjections to that agency. Whats more, natural history also
resembles the cyclical movement of capitalist production as it oscillates between mythic violence,
or pressures from the market, and sovereign jouissance, or the fetish quality of commodity (78,
82). So it initiates an intervention that ends the present status and an excitation that induces one
to attach to that, too (76, 80). Thus, while associating natural history with politics and capitalistic

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production, Santner attempts to exemplify it as a process that testifies to those rises and falls (of
political reigns and consumers trends) emerging within a span of time.
Because natural history explicates double movements operating in its processon a process of
time-passing-by there are a melancholic immersion aroused by seeing remnants left by changes
and making one connect to new object of desire with an affective posture of fidelity, and a mode of
defense that prevents one from truly substituting it with a determinate loss (89, 90), Santner
endeavors to psychoanalyze it via the idea of human sexuality in terms of Lacanian
interpretations of Sigmund Freuds theory (31). That is, for Santner, natural history is a mode of
subjectivization that is caused by psychic events connected to the birth of sexuality in the human
child (31). Since the child is both traumatized and agitated by the overproximity which possesses
a certain structural value in an encounter with the enigma of paternal desire (32), this event that,
Santner quotes Jacques Lacans words, [a] lack is encountered by the subject in the Other, in the
very intimation that the Other makes to [the child] by his discourse reveals the encounter with the
neighbor in ones selfhood formation (qtd. in 32). Given that this neighbor, or the other, demands
the child to respond to his desire/love and sets him/her in a difficult situation with his enigmatic
messagesthe sexual desire that is more than the satisfaction of needs and is beyond his/her ability
to symbolize it, the signifying stress is induced and drives the child to find proper words to
respond to the neighbor/others calling (33). This event forms what we understand as human
subjectivity by leaving in ones ego life the residues that are modeled after the source-object of
the drives (32). For Santner, the neighbor, by stirring ones burdensome excitement and opening
up a distance between the self and the other, is a traumatic kernel (dis)organizing ones selfhood
(xii, xiii). As the openness of Being (12)that the child perceives an essential disruption in
his/her understandingis uncovered in the encounter with the neighbor, such creatureliness of man
that is similar to the animal that seems to be free and ignorant in this state is traumatic but is also
the matrix of relations in political and social dimension (xvii).

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Therefore, Santner proffers a natural historical understanding of human being by integrating

allegorical sensibility of Benjamins idea of natural history with Lacanian psychoanalysis (33). As
natural history points to a fundamental feature of human life that a symbolic mode in which the
link between figure and meaning is experienced as a human construct (17, 18), it, like human
sexuality that is induced by the enigma of the others desire/love, presents a process that one meets
his/her creatureliness and is driven to grasp what that means. Such genesis of selfhood catches one
in a paradoxical state that constitutes the basis of relations in various cultural spheres and manifests
a possibility of ethicsone is demanded to respond and can do it through what he/she assumes that
demand of desire/love is. Besides, it also enables us to read the encounters with creaturely things or
objects in W. G. Sebald and Rainer Maria Rilkes works allegoricallynot merely to investigate
how those characters see beyond their selfhood and how they respond to it ethically, but also to
rethink how we readers can intervene and respond to the creaturely dimension that entwines
characters in the immobile cultural relations in both writers works.
So, as both Benjamin and Santners illustrations on natural history offer two seemingly
dissimilar interpretative approaches to literature, we can discover that the two in fact complement
each other in terms of the critical angle they take. That is, given that Benjamin accentuates on the
allegorical potentials which expressions in a narrative or artistic arrangements in a work carry,
Santner, by adopting a psychoanalytical point of view that explains how the selfhood is formed,
places his critical focus on the ethical potential which the creaturely sphere disclosed in literary or
artistic works drives both characters and readers to respond to such otherness. In other words, the
former deems a work as a temporal presentation of the truth among others on the course of the
so-called literature or art history; contrariwise, the latter links literary production to a universal
model of psyche formation and develops what he calls the psychotheological understanding of
literature. However, if Benjamin, by coupling literary works with his immanent thought about truth,
occupies the position of an observer which enables him to gather the relation among a work, its

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narrative or artistic expression and its historical context, Santner forms his idea from the other way
around. Whereas he models his idea on the standpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Santner delves
into the content of a literary work about how the creatureliness is exposed in historical remnants so
that he, we readers and even characters in the novels can respond to remnants accompanied with the
form of a work rather than deal with the form of a work.
Therefore, by compounding both scholars points of view, we can extract a natural historical
interpretation that embraces the relationship between the historical background and the expressive
form of a work, and the relationship between the psychological depths of characters and the
contents of a work. As Benjaminian natural history stresses on the singularity of a work that
bespeaks the shaping forces brought out by the historicity of its narrative course and its context,
Santnerian one emphasizes on the universal neighbor sphere revealed in a work. Allegory, a
symbolic mode that makes us associate the death displayed in German mourning play or the
neighbor exhibited in the a structural event of selfhood formation, can link boththe death shown
in the form and the neighbor in the contentas well. While death and neighbor both point out a
disruptive dimension that neither characters in the mourning plays nor those in Sebald and Rilkes
works can cross over, such correspondence not only indicates a constituting congruence between
historicity and psyche formation which nourishes literary productions in both the Baroque, the
modern and even the contemporary periodthe sense of alienation caused by the absence of the
belief in progress and humanism which drives both those mourning play writers, Sebald, and Rilke
to responds to it via either the form or the content of their works. This correspondence that conjoins
history, selfhood, form and content of a work into one constellation of ideas also suggests to us a
way to approach literature. Through an integration of Benjamins and Santners natural historical
thoughts which respectively accents on the singularity of the mourning play within the course of
literature history and the ethical potential in both Sebald and Rilkes creative writings, we can try to
interpret the singularity of a work in terms of its ethical responses to the neighbor sphere that

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concerns its historical context as well.

Back to White Noise, how can we understand it via this constellation of ideashistory, human
psyche, form and contentinspired by Benjaminian and Santnerian natural history? In DeLillos
novel, while death is simultaneously presented as a structural component and a thematic feature, it
appears in the course of Jacks narrative as many kinds of images, either in the forms of concrete
objects or in terms of abstract ideas that constitute Jacks lifeHitler, Dylar, the plot or even the
toxic cloud in the airborne toxic event. Death is also a motivation and a force that structures and
develops the narrativebeing Jacks nightmarish fear that drives him to arrest life, a sort of
disappearance that commodity and technology make him to be, or a deprivation of physical and
material properties that marks and completes the finitude of his existence. So to speak, no matter
how death appears in the noveldirectly embodying itself via depictions about Jacks quotidian life
or indirectly displaying itself in descriptions about how he carries his days, its always present and
absent. That is, to Jack, death, as one apparent reference to the presence of things other than itself in
White Noise, seems to be paradoxically a remnant and a lacka creaturely sphere that both
demands and resists Jacks understanding. Whereas itbeing an existential state that will befall a
living entity one day but is always an impossible happening that may be and may not be
experienced by a living creature at any momentis (a reminder that there is) another possible form
of life, to him, death is what he cant truly experience but what he can postulate by subtracting it
from what he is now. While it is a hole in space and time that one is [t]o be lost without a trace
or [t]o be swept away (101, 169), death not merely marks a final line, a border or limit of life
(229), but it is also what makes [life] incomplete and what makes him wonder [w]ho decides
[it] (284, 103). Death, as an absence that is always guaranteed by his own presence, isnt so
absent for Jack that he can straightaway ignore its existence. Instead, because of the fear and the
anxiety it incessantly brings up by reminding him of [his] [impossibly] satisfying life (285), Jack
can still sense its absent but imminent existence while so many things around him suggest its

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presence to him.
However, rather than being an absent presence, death is also a professional matter that Jack
discusses in the classroom (74). As he gives a lecture about the legacy of Hitler and is immersed in
his professional aura of power, madness and death (72), death this possible but yet-to-come
existential state becomes an instrument for him to maximize his value as a top scholar of Hitler
studies. Like what Murray hints to him, even though its an abstract idea or an existential state,
death is not just what one shall be afraid of. It can be exercised for gaining more power as wellto
kill is to defeat [ones] own death (291). Besides, insofar as death can be actualized in such act of
killing, this abstract and absent idea enables him to benefit from its deathly aura by making a Hitler
scholar. Yet, death is still omnipresent but non-actualized, like the killing potential of the toxic
cloud or the reliance on technology and commodities in the novel. Therefore, in White Noise, death,
being both absent and present, seemingly drives Jack to encounter the creaturely sphere of his life
again and again. That is to say, while such existential state seems to let Jack discover that there
exists a neighbor in the formation of his sense of selfits partially what he can explain and
partially what he will never be able to, death does provide him various chances to reconsider his
own being on the narrative history of this novel. Such as his involvement in Hitler studies, the
toxic event and even his revenge on Mink, those events challenge his thoughts about his own
eventual death, nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful and bring his creaturely spherean alien
sphere that he cannot truly get intothat is so close to him (76).
Rather, Jack still adopts his thoughts to capture itbeing a hole, a dread or a must that he tries
to evade. To him, death, this deprivation of life, is never an unapproachable other. Thus, I proclaim,
death has always been reduced to what Jack, given his ossified role within the social network,
attempts to exclude in White Noise. No matter how death appears in his life, either as the
creatureliness or the neighbor, Jack, instead of listening to its demand and responding to it, chooses
an elusive but innocent way to counteract ithe wishes to carry on his aimless days and makes

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no plots only (18). Namely, in order to preserve the world he recognizesa world that death is not
radically alien but can be assimilated into thoughts he can tell or instruments he can use, Jack
chooses to stay in the shield built up by those relations hes familiar with rather than listens to what
death this neighbor calls him to respond.
Nevertheless, such failure to face up real death or neighbor in the novel corresponds to Jacks
innocence manifested by the attitude hidden in his narrative method. On the course of the
narrative of this novel, Jacks obsession with deaththe end of time that marks the end of
lifemakes him render each occurrence in an open-ended, thus unresolved, manner so that
subsequent event is rendered either as a dj vu or a prophetic vision, which is marked by a similar
paradoxical sense of timean innocence that the story can be freed from any critical label and be
continuously prolonged without any finalized closure. That is, on the narrative history in White
Noise, if the depiction of Jacks failure to respond to the neighbor repeatedly discloses Jacks
innocent attitude that he doesnt accept what is absolutely alien and unknowable to him for he
cannot know what death exactly is to him, the end of time that uncovers itself in the unfolding of
each event makes such feeling visible in the novel as well. While the formhow a literary or
artistic work is arranged to exhibit its singularityalso delivers what the content shows, the
congruence between the form and the content not only enables us to reaffirm Jacks elusive mood
via its narrative form, but also helps us to ponder upon how Jacks innocence is formed. Whereas
the end of time points out that each unresolved event resembles a past event and prefigures a future
event as well, such sense of time that the present seemingly disappears clues us to rethink why Jack
chooses not to see death/neighbor but to anchor his days in concrete and corporeal things in his
lifeto conserve the integrity of the present is to un-end it by advancing and postponing effects
brought up by changes. So to speak, from natural historical thoughts proposed by Benjamin and
Santner, we can conjoin Jacks sense of self, the form and the content of White Noise together. As
they all demonstrate a sense of innocence that displays Jacks unwillingness to accept the existence

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of something that he cant really know or control, I would like to add that such innocence does
concern about the context of DeLillos work. In the following, via a brief analysis on two major
events concerning about death occurred to Jack, I attempt to illustrate how his innocence is shown
in his own utopian thoughtthat is, Jack, being confident that his idea of life will definitely be
fulfilled in the future, rejects and contradicts the fact of any kind of change that is not included in
the world view secured by his innocent optimism.

Innocence Revealing
In White Noise, even though the fear of death ceaselessly haunts Jack and continuously drives
him to grasp what is related to life in his days, such apparent orientation brought up by death
corresponds to his view of the world he lives in. While deathbeing either an absent presence or a
present absenceis what Jack can assimilate into thoughts and use, at least figuratively, as useful
instruments, his desire and effort to contain death demystifies it and transforms it into what he can
evade by diving into social relations he is embedded in. The position he takes, keeping him from
death within a knowable distance, also manifests Jacks confidence in his invincibilitythat is,
the world he lives in can seemingly absorb death if he keeps his own innocence and tries to
maintain distances from it. In the following, from two exampleshow Jack reacts to two major
events concerning about death, the toxic cloud and his revenge on Mink, I would like to indicate
innocence Jack manifests in DeLillos work corresponding to the kind of American innocence that
May discovers in American civilizationa belief that ties moralism, progress and culture together.
To May, while he attempts to delineate the revolution that happened in twentieth century
America, he, rather than directly attributes the reason of it to the outbreak of the world war or
urbanization and technological changes, places his emphasis on the tradition of American
civilization to figure out the way people deal either with daily routine or with catastrophe (xii).
That is, from what grounds peoples mindsets, May tries to show how this tradition influences the

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outbreak and the outcome of the revolution, which continuously makes the revolution going on in
America. In his thought, there are three articles of faith that constitute such tradition
(9)moralism, progress and culture (30). First of all, moralism, like a history of American
thought that includes the ideas of thinkers such as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson and Waldo
Ralph Emerson, is a belief in a certain moral judgments that could be and must be applied not
only to the conduct of individuals but also to the doings of trusts and labor unions, cities and
nations and thus renders America a special responsibility for moral judgment (9, 10). To put this
differently, for most Americans, moralism is a belief in idealismthat nothing exists without mind,
that everything therefore in the long run is idea (11). Besides, influenced by Darwinian thought
about a cruel process of the biological evolution, Americans also believe in that [o]ut of struggle
and chaos emerged lawthat the unfolding of moral law will appear in the process of history
(12). That is to say, for most Americans, in the unfolding American future those unseen goals
and standards that they believe in will be actualized (14); at the same time, the reality, certainty
and eternity of moral values like truth, justice, patriotism, unselfishness, and decency will be
unpacked and accompanied with their goals in the future (9).
Second, the belief in progress not only reconciles a belief in eternal mortal truth with the
belief in the desirability of change (20). It also proves there is an underlying goodness or the
eternal moral truths hidden in [t]he progress of the world or a direction for social change (20).
To Americans, this belief in progress has two different kinds of progressionit is an inevitable and
universal improvement, and a natural progress that man can speed up (20-21). Namely, this belief
discloses American peoples general agreement and confidence about their achievement of moral
goodness in the future (21). Whereas they dont reject adopting new method or making some
changes for adapting themselves into new conditions, Americans, no matter what kind of method
they adopt, believe that theyre moving toward to accomplishing the goal that is clearly ahead after
all. So, regardless its a failure of imagination which seems to limit their thoughts about future to

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an ossified goal, on the one hand, this belief in progress continuously provides reformer confidence
and energies to carry revolutions out. Their continuing experience of triumph that reformer in the
twentieth century undergo expels their doubts and sustain[s] their central belief on the other hand
(24). Third, the belief in culture which refers to the belief in a particular part of the heritage from
the European past, including polite manners, respect for traditional learning, appreciation of the arts,
and above all an informed and devoted love of standard literature complements the former two
beliefs although its weaker than them (30). Even Americans believe that they will abolish
grossness and cruelty and reproduce all goodness in the English civilization (31); they wanted it
and yet they looked at it askance (33). Their simultaneous dependence on the past and wish to
construct their own tradition correspond to their beliefs in moralism and progress; that is,
Americans believe that they are able to deal with questions innate in English civilization and new
ones brought by immigrants or rising materialism, which reflects that their beliefs that moralism
and progress will be fulfilled in the realm of American culture as well.
Therefore, from these three beliefs that are interwoven into the idea of American innocence,
although May proclaims that American civilization has been less happy, less unanimous, and more
precarious after the war (398), he does outline a principal structure in the American intellectual and
cultural traditionan idealism that a moral judgment will be achieved in the cultural sphere within
the progress of history. That is to say, via these beliefs, we can discover that Americans place
themselves in a rather peculiar position for carrying out such destinythey think they are
exceptional. On the one hand, their consented ideals, notwithstanding being moral, are formed with
their consensus instead through the others impositions. Their spiritual correspondences with those
ideals authenticate the moral value of them. On the other hand, even though their cultural tradition
originated from England, their confidence in their ability to create a new one overpasses their
awareness of their cultural dependence. Namely, as how they ascertain their moral judgment,
Americans are self-reliant on their own minds, which they think will lead them to somewhere

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brighter and better. So to speak, American innocence not only explicates how moralism, progress
and culture combine into a process of thought. It points out a key characteristic of American thought
as wellthey are so different that they can be so innocently optimistic.
In White Noise, when Jack undergoes two events concerning about deaththe airborne toxic
event and the revenge on Mink, his responses that he first negates the possibility of any occurrence
of changes and then ignores the effects they bring to his life expose his innocent optimism. While
both events more or less change the world he lives inhis good life is not truly free from death and
his reliance on his earthly wife doesnt guarantee him real protection against death, Jack still insists
on thinking the world as what he assumes it to be. Such innocenceJack seems to pretend that
those changes dont really happen to himis not merely an evasive attitude for temporally
shielding him from the shock of those changes. I proclaim, instead, it shows his intense confidence
in his own belief. While Jack fears some kind of deft acceleration and wishes to enjoy these
aimless days (18), I contend that such attitude isnt a self-deceptive way for protecting himself
from the threat of death. Its his confidence that he believes that his life has already been in its best
state and will always be like thishaving a secure career, an earthly wife and energy-packed
children, and living in a nice town. As the toxic event and Babettes affair do uncover the mutability
of his life, Jack, by following the governmental direction of evacuation and attempting to kill Mink,
not simply adapts himself to the new situation and tries to preserve what he cherishes the most. For
the most important part, because of his strong confidence, Jack can carry on his daily routines
without any change even after these two dreadful eventshe can still shop in the supermarket and
watch sunsets with his families without being beaten down by the changes both events bring.
In the airborne toxic event, before the toxic cloud forces the Gladneys to evacuate, it
undergoes a process of renaming that gradually exposes what it is to both characters and we readers.
In the beginning, Jack, noticing his son Heinrich crouching on the ledge outside the attic of their
house, goes to ask him to come down and learns that there is a tank car derailed and a heavy black

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mass hanging above (110). Replying his son with It wont come this way (110), Jack asks
Heinrich to get into the house and feels nothing about the appearance of that black mass. Later,
from radio broadcast and his son, Jack knows that it is called a feathery plume and is composed
by a chemical named as Nyodene Derivative or Nyodene D. (111). Although he is aware that this
toxic waste is dangerous for it may cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath (111), Jack
refuses to consider the possibility that he and his families will confront this featherly plume.
Dismissing it with a causal Well, it wont come this way (111), he declines to take any action to
prevent or to counter this situation. Even his wife, Babette, joins his discussions about it with their
children and informs that this plume is now called A black billowing cloud and is perhaps being
blown to another direction (113); her obvious concern about it doesnt change his opinion at all.
Jack still insists that Nothing is going to happen (114). Unlike Babette who pretends not to pay
attention to it in order not to scare their kids, Jack expresses his confidence in his good life by
proclaiming:
These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such
way that its the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and
man-made disastersIm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor
rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and
pleasant townThese things dont happen in places like Blacksmith. (114)
To him, this dangerous billowing cloud may be disastrous, but its for other people rather than a
professor or a townsperson like him. In a way, to Jack, this cloud is just a thing that isnt related to
his world. As he, continuously gaining his knowledge about this cloud via the radio updates, asserts
that their more and more accurate description means theyre coming to grips with the thing (113),
Jack not only manifests his confidence that the social network which has placed him in his temporal
social status will protect him and his family from damaging things like this cloud. He also expresses
his confidence in the power of knowledgeto know a thing is to make one be able to avoid it. Just

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like how Jack responds to Babettes Lets think about the billowing cloud. Just a little bit, okay
(115)all we have to do is stay out of the way (115), to him, such distance guaranteed by
knowledge can both prevent him from drastic changes and prove his belief in carrying the best life
right.
However, after Jack goes back to the attic to observe that derailment scene again, he gains a
different perspective from the information fed to him by his son that this featherly plume is now
named [t]he airborne toxic event (117). This renaming also brings new symptomscausing
[h]eart palpitations and a sense of dj vu. (116). Still, in protesting that [the cloud is] there,
were here (117), Jack refuses to acknowledge that the good situation he is in now may change
while the information about this cloud is continuously changing. He even confesses: Im not just a
college professor. Im the head of a department. I dont see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event.
Thats for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish
hatcheries are (117). Namely, in seeing himself as a man who doesnt dwell in such a miserable
state that he has to move all the time like those people in mobile houses, Jack firmly believes in his
immobile place in his world. As the head of a department and a resident of a pleasant town, he
does not have to think about this event that maybe it is, maybe it isnt [important] to his life (117).
Rather, When do we eat (113)focusing on his good lifeis what he has to think about only.
Nevertheless, as the air-raid sirens sound and a voiceEvacuate all places of residence.
Cloud of deadly chemicalsappears (119), Jack and his family, on the dining table, are
negatively affected (118). As if they try to avoid a thing [they] would do well not to provoke
(118), they eat so meticulously that this caution in their movements tells their intentionsJack and
his family expect that they might be able to shun those alarms. Not until they are on their way
driving to the refugee camp do they adjust themselves to the actuality of things, the absurd fact of
evacuation (120). On this occasion, while he is aware that [n]o ones knowledge is less secure
than your own (120), Jack attempts to learn more information about this toxic event from the radio.

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But, except that [p]eople already indoors were asked to stay indoors and three more symptoms are
added[c]onvulsions, coma, miscarriage (121, 121), he knows nothing more about the cloud or
the event. Only in the face-to-face encounter with it do Jack and his family grasp some ideas about
what it is:
The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legendWe werent
sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides,
benzinesor whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the
grandness of a sweeping eventOur fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that
bordered on the religiousThis was a death made in the laboratory, defined and
measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple and primitive way, as some
seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to control.
Out helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event. (emphasis
added 127-28)
To Jack, the toxic cloud is a secret festering thing that carries ambiguous meanings (128). While
its a cosmos force that threatens [ones] life (127), rather than something completely strange,
this cloud makes him to associate it with some other earthly things, an overflow or a hurricane (127).
Yet, as that toxic cloud is like one dreamy sound-and-light show (128), its power that is
something not subject to control instead infuses Jack with terror and awe (127). Furthermore,
even though it is a death made in the laboratory to him (127), in White Noise, no one, including
Jack, ascertains that this toxic cloud really kills.3 So, we could ascertain that, for Jack, this cloud
not just exceeds his knowledge, but also endangers the good life he believes that he has. At least, it
shows Jack that something out of his own knowledge does exist and even can happen to him in his
3

In White Noise, whether the toxic cloud is fatal to human or not is one mystery to characters and to readers. In the
novel, the most detailed description about its toxicity comes from Heinrich. From the movie he sees at his school,
Heinrich learns that Nyodene D. causes rats to grow lumps and is byproduct[s] of the manufacture of insecticide (111;
131). Yet, in his understanding, there is no direct indication that this toxic would kill human. Whats more, even
SIMUVAC official in the shelter, sent by government for controlling evacuation, knows nothing about it and even tells
Jack not to worry about what he cant see or feel (141). Thusly, in White Noise, whether the toxic cloud kills or not is a
suspended question.

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life. Nonetheless, from his initial indifference towards the cloud, his paralyzed reactions to sirens
and his uncertainty about how to interpret it, to his homecoming nine days after his second
evacuation from the evacuate camp to Iron City, this process that almost actualizes death in Jacks
life does not bring real change to him at all. As this ambiguous toxic event that is supposed to occur
in other places and to other people obtrudes his pleasant town and forces a chairperson like him to
evacuate, these changes do not make him move away or rethink whether his life is still as good as
he used to think. Instead, after this event, he quickly resumes his ordinary life. Even though he finds
out the sunset becomes extremely beautiful and guesses that is because of the special character of
Nyodene Derivative (170), he, thinking no one had been able to prove it (170), still goes to the
supermarket for shopping and even meets his colleague Murray there. Such indifference towards the
effects the toxic event bringsthe life Jack carries on is not as wonderful as he presumes, I assert,
is not a performative evasion that he adopts to disavow the existence of something uncontrollable or
even deathly intentionally. It manifests his ultimate innocence which he performs in his lifeit will
and must be as good as he thinks even though its temporally interrupted.
This performative innocence also emerges in the process of Jacks revenge on Mink, a drug
experiment manager who takes charge of Dylar and has an affair with his wife. After he discovers
that Babette is taking a secret medicine named Dylar and, with the help of Winnie, gradually finds
out what that is, one night, Babette confesses to Jack on their brass bed her affair with Mink, who is
called Mr. Gray until Winnie exposes his real name and exact information about him. Yet, while
Babette explains to Jack why she does thatshe feels so depressed for her fear of death that she
attends the Dylar experiment in a hope to eliminate her extra-sensitive fear, Jack, unlike what he
used to doto actively figure out what actually happened and then to distance himself from that
with his understnading, endeavors to interrupt her confession from time to time. As Babette tells
him that she is facing [a] kind of settling-in-period (191), Jack replies that Ive never seen you
like this. This is the whole point of Babette. Shes a joyous person. She doesnt succumb to gloom

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or self-pity (191). In a way that is similar to how he responds to the existence of a feathery
plume, Jack not only speaks out his disbelief via his negative reply that refuses to admit the
existence of such changes. His This is the whole point of Babette is as evasive as his It wont
come this way (191, 110), which yet uncovers his confidence in the truthfulness of his
understanding as well. Then, as Babette reveals more details about the experiment she joins, a drug
named Dylar, and even her voluntary affair with Mink, Jack even tries to interpose her talk with
questions like Ill make some hot chocolate. Would you like that? and Theres some Jell-O with
banana slicesSteffie made it.(192, 195).
For him, it seems like that acknowledging the dark side of Babette is intolerable. Although he
says, The whole point of Babette is that she speaks to me, she reveals and confides (192), his
intervening questions instead shows his unwilling to listen to her and to face what she confesses. I
contend, such ambiguity caused by his words and attitude shows that what makes Jack
uncomfortable is not what she really does. Rather, its his disappointment that makes him unable to
accept itBabette who talks to him is not the Babette he knows. That is, her revelation about her
gloomy fear not just breaks the image he has for her, but also his image about his good life. By
telling her, You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool. Thats what I cant forgive you for.
Telling me youre not the woman I believed you were. Im hurt, Im devastated (emphasis added
197), Jack, unlike his indifferent response to the toxic cloud, points out that he, being devastated,
seems to suffer from a symbolic death. Whereas one element of his good lifean earthly wifeis
no longer there as he believes, he, as if loses [his] strength, [his] life-force (199), begins to be
influenced by some sort of loss in the rest of the novel. He keeps imagining Babettes sexual scene
with Mink (232, 241, 268, 296). Whats more, he even tries hard to get the rest of Dylar taken by
his daughter Denise (211), has extra two times medical checkups (204, 275), starts to throw old
things in his household away (222, 262, 294) and even takes a gun given by his father-in-law with
him to the school as well (297). From these details in Jacks life, we can discover that his anxiety is

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like a button pressed by his acknowledging of Babettes affair. No matter what he doesto check
his health condition or to throw things away, Jack acts like that he aims at searching for something
he doesnt ascertain at all. Like how Mr. Gray/Mink appears in his imaginations[t]he picture
wobbled and rolled and even distorted, rippling, unfinished (241, 296), Babettes affair brings
him such an uncertainty that he doesnt know how to deal with it as how he tries to evade death.
What he can do is to get some sense of security via things he temporally can control. Thus, although
Jack doesnt make any apparent changes to his daily lifehe doesnt divorce Babette or move out
the town he, Babette and his children live in, his overflowing disquiet shown by his anxiety
foreshadows that he has and will take some action; that is, to revenge on Mink.
Death, in this nearly ending part of the novel, becomes quite peculiar in its signification to Jack.
Since its reduced to what Jacks role within the social network excludes, death is both assimilated
into ideas he can understand and instruments he can adopt. In other words, such view to the world
he lives inhe is in a position that death can be kept within a comfortable distanceshall
guarantee his invincibility like what he does in his encounter with the toxic cloud. Even the toxic
cloud is not what he can totally absorb into his own knowledge; his indifference to the effects this
cloud brings uphis profession, pleasant town and his family life are not as wonderful as he
supposes to beshows his innocent confidence that he believes in the good life he must and will
have. Yet, Babettes affair that causes Jacks revenge is unlike the airborne toxic event whose effects
he can totally ignore without a second thought. Whereas it relates to the dissolution of his good life
directlyhis earthly wife isnt earthly but fear-stricken, and his life anchored in everydayness isnt
warranted anymore, such challenge elicits his deepest fear by breaking his innocent confidence. Not
merely does he lose one of [t]he most deeply precious things he feels secure about (285)[a]
wife, a child (285). He also discovers that he cannot pretend [death] isnt there by simply
reducing it to what he can grasp and even use (285). Death that is kept away by his innocent
confidence in the good life guarded by his social relations, to Jack, is not as remote as he thinks

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before. Nevertheless, in his discussion about death with Murray, he realizes truths [he has] always
known at some basic level (293)to plot is to live and to take aim at something, to shape time
and space (291, 292). That is to say, although Jack, via Babettes affair, experiences an irreducible
death that his belief never lets him meet before, he knows in his heart that he can still deal with
itto kill for a change and for gaining the ultimate upper hand (291). While he,
notwithstanding his saying that he wishes to enjoy these aimless days (18), has already carried out
a life with an aimto live with a secure job, with a lively wife and children and in a pleasant town,
such awareness that he can control death by becoming a killer instead exposes his ultimate belief in
his exceptional and self-reliant state (291). If what shocks Jack the most in his acknowledgment of
Bebettes affair is the fact that his good life is gone and his good life is symbolically killed, killing
the man who has an affair with his wife cannot really compensate for that loss. As change is
happened, Babette, at least in Jacks mind, is not the one he thinks he used to know. Whats more,
even though Jack notices that his life is different from what he supposes, he still clings to his good
life and endures the effectsanxietythat drives him to do something he cant help doing. So to
speak, I assert, in White Noise, no matter what kind of deadly things Jack encounters, he always
believes that his good life must and will be actualized. To kill Mink is not only a way to prove his
capacity of controlling his death. His failed murderthat he is also shot by Mink and then he even
takes him to a nearby hospitalalso exhibits the god-like role he plays in his revenge: Something
large and grand and scenic. Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act
than to live a resolutely neutral life? I knew I felt virtuous, I felt blood-stained and stately, dragging
the badly wounded man through the dark and empty street (emphasis added 314). Namely, while
he can decide to let Mink live rather than die, this god-like or sovereignty-like position bespeaks his
belief in his exceptional state. As he is the definer and the executor of his ideal good life, Jack, even
though he chooses to murder, can free himself from any kind of guilt or even crime in the novel.
Moreover, even he does, he still thinks that he is virtuous. And, after his killing, for Jack, [t]here

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was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset (321). To put it differently, his revenge on Mink is
like a transition method that Jack does for preserving the integrity of his ideal. His killing and
saving Mink seems to un-end this event. As this event is caused by the disturbance of Jacks ideal
life, it shall not be really ended for that its supposed not to happen at all. Thus, after this event,
paradoxically, Jack can still carry on his ordinary lifehe still shops and watches sunset with his
family without feeling strange. Such indifference that Jack can restore his good life without
incurring any disastrous result after he tries to murder best exemplifies his innocent optimismhe
so believes in his own ideal and the actualization of it that he is careless about how he achieves it
and what he has to undergo.

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Conclusion
Toward Post-apocalypse

I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see

all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God.
Nature (1109)

White Noise, via its form and content expressive of the end of time and natural history, is
allegorical in its paradoxical presentations. While figurations of both form and content seem to be
evacuated by self-contradictory expressions in Jacks narrativetime is experienced in occurrences
of each narrated event but is suspended for their un-resolved-ness and death is feared for its
omnipresent absence but is evaded like a graspable presence, an exceptional position Jack takes up
in this novel is exhibited. That is, whereas time and death are ideas that condense their senses in
solidified figuresthe experience of time passing and the knowable yet unpredictable idea about
the termination of life, Jack, in his narrative that captures both through his language deployments
and depictions, exercises an epistemological privilege. By drawing the expression of his
presentation backto make time not passed and death not ungraspable, Jack not only demonstrates
his sovereignty of being the narrator. With such an avoiding attitude that seemingly bypasses direct
figurations in his paradoxical presentations, Jack also displays his singular view toward the world,
which enables us to allegorize White Noise and associate it with American innocence that relates to
the optimism in the tradition of American civilization.
In this thesis, in Chapter One, by coining a termthe end of time, Id discussed how the
paradoxical sense of time in the novel causes the interpretative difficulty to all readers. While the
temporal relatedness and thematic unrelatedness of Jacks narrative makes every event seemingly be

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both unimportant/quotidian and important/singular, such aporia forces White Noise to lose its
critical focus; whats more, it also lets us disorient in its paradoxical figuration. Via a review of
three critics essays and Hoffmanns notion of situationalism, instead of following whom tries to
take either an image or a possibility of multiplicity to replace that paradox in the novel, I turn to the
corethe paradoxical sense of timeand discover that such temporal paradox manifests Jacks
wish to be innocent. That is, by refusing to end time that would make an event or a happening to be
un-ended, the end of time in the novel exhibits Jacks desires to be free from any restraints of being
settled down and thus be uncritical to what occurs to him as well.
In Chapter Two, through Benjamin and Santners natural history, Id contended that Jacks
narrative that both concerned about death and the end of time makes itself a natural history. On the
narrative course that death as a structural element and a narrative forcewhat Jack considers death
is and his fear of itare continuously exposed in the incessantly ends of time in the novel, such
congruence between the form and the content, according to both scholars views, not only cues us to
expand our interpretive scope to historical context the novel corresponds to and psyche of its
characters. It also clues us that, through Jacks response to deathhe can assimilate it into thoughts
he can tell or instruments he can use and keep a comfortable distance from it, the innocence hidden
in the form accords with the content. That is to say, the content, like the form, exhibits Jacks
innocencehe attempts to elude death by sticking to life he anchors in. Then, with the help of the
innocence May observes in American culture, I further examine what kind of belief supports Jacks
innocence. By delving into two deathly events happened in the novel, I discover that his belief in
his exceptional state not only makes him be indifferent to changes occurring in his life. Such
indifference exemplifies his innocent optimism as wellhe never doubts about his own ideal of
good life and the actualization of it. Therefore, his confidence in his ideal makes him be able to do
and to stand whatever for preserving it, even a murder.
So, in White Noise, the position Jack takes does correspond to Bergers Reaganist

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post-apocalyptic rhetoric. Like what Id discussed in Chapter One, the paradoxical sense of time in
DeLillos novel not only discloses its structural aporia in form that its temporal relatedness and
thematic unrelatedness do not accord with each other and make it uncritical for the lack of a
narrated focus. This incongruity also bespeaks an unspoken desire hidden in its paradoxical
structure of narrative; that is, a wish to be innocent. Since time doesnt truly end in the novel and
thus makes each event happened but unresolved, such way of expression lets the narrator Jack being
free from any responsibility incurred by his actions or reactions performed in the consecutive
sequence of events in White Noise. As if every event is occurred before and will befall to him again
afterward, Jack eliminates his position as the acting subject in the novel. Whats more, inasmuch as
every event becomes a prophecy and a dj vu for its unresolvedness, this sense of the end of time
demonstrates Jacks eluding attitude toward any bad consequence as well. Like how Reagan
responds to Kings achievement in his post-apocalyptic rhetoric, while advancing and postponing
effects of any occurrence in his narrative, Jack seemingly endeavors to preserve his perfection by
concentrating on his experiences of the presence. Whereas his narrative bears no obvious critique
against any happening in the novel, this uncritical posture both addresses his desire to be innocent
and protects him from seeing what is damaging, such as the man made toxic cloud, in his life.
However, in Jacks narrative, there is something other than its form expressive of innocence.
Given that the innocence in White Noise is supported by Jack optimistic belief in his good life,
which is discussed in Chapter Two, such innocence also shows an epistemological stance via Jacks
response to death. In DeLillos novel, as death is regarded as a material deprivation that marks the
finitude of being and the existential lack of ones life, it elicits Jacks fear because of its
unpredictability and unknowableness that he cant truly control and experience death. Yet, such
complicated responses to death become both a structural element and a narrative force of this novel.
Since death is reduced to an absent presence that is always presenta deprivation that Jack can
shun by diving into his everyday life, death, a happening that will occur to one in the future rather

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than the presence, is transformed into a knowable thing that one can avoid. Such substantiation or
translation from absence to presence not only manifests Jacks desire to be all-seeing. It also
exhibits his performative innocence that he believes in his own invincibility. Even though he
encounters two deathly events in the novelthe airborne toxic event and his revenge on Mink, he
still clings to his optimistic confidence for he firmly believes in his good life, like the attitude May
refers to American innocencean idealism that a moral judgment one believes in will certainly be
achieved in the future. This innocent belief that enables Jack to react indifferently to major events
occurring to him is rather similar to Reaganist post-apocalyptic rhetoric. Even changes, or
apocalypses such as revolution, unjust racism or the toxic event, are about to take place or are
happening; for both Reagan and Jack, those are what has already been past. Given that the
perfection of America or his good life is what is and will be achieved, for both, this belief drives
them disavow the fact of its imperfection or changeability. Such denial, like Benjamin and Santners
ideas of natural history that help us to seethe possible correspondence among form, content,
context and human psyche, not only assists us to discover the congruence between the form and the
content of White Noise, the disavowal to utter any critique and to admit any unseeable thing existing.
This denial attitude also cues us to allegorize Jacks innocence to other historical contexts and
cultural references. Such as Jonathan Edwards City on a Hill, Ralph Emersons transparent eyeball
and Tom Paines We have it in our power to begin the world over again (Berger 133), all these
clues us to read Jacks innocence from the optimistic confidence in ones exceptional state that
American culture bases upon. It also suggests us to ponder what kind of trauma, like the one
Reagan attempts to avoidthe cultural and political upheaval in the 1960s, Jacks narrative
endeavors to evade.
Though White Noise is regarded as one of the most representative work of postmodern novels,
Jacks narrative that delineates various postmodern cultural phenomena but offers no obvious
judgment about them brings up a vital question to all readershow postmodern it is. That is, from

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Jacks stance that he denies the effect of diverse events happening in his life, his narration that
ambiguously responds to the alleged postmodern condition confuses us with its perplexing
significationis it a symptom, a diagnosis, or an endorsement of the condition of postmodernity?
(Knight 27). In this thesis, beginning from this question, I respectively explore the feature of form
and content of White Noise in my two chapters. By pointing out desires to be innocent and to be
all-seeing hidden behind Jacks narrative form about the end of time and content about his fear of
death, I, while engaging in ideas such as natural history, American innocence and post-apocalypse,
discover that Jacks ambiguous attitude in his own narrative manifests his confidence in his belief.
As the good lifebeing a renowned professor, having an earthly wife and energy-packing children,
and living in a pleasant townis what he believes his world is and will be, Jack passively waits
changes brought by the toxic event gone or actively eliminates ones Babettes affair causes via
killing. This optimistic confidence not only portrays what continuously motivates Jack to carry on
his aimless dayshis belief. It also pictures the relationship between Jack and his historical
context.
While postmodern world incessantly takes the soul-consuming media coupled with
consumerism, the fatality of chemical exposure and miraculous yet awing power of biomedical
science to Jacks front, his insistence on his own belief, except for his faithfulness, demonstrates his
in-betweenness that he is too perplexed to respond to those changes in his life. Like how he reacts
in two major events in the novel, his denial of the possible coming of the toxic cloud and earthly
Babettes fear of death manifests that he can do nothing but being indifferent to these unfamiliar
things. Such evasive attitude, paradoxically, comports with his innocent insistence. As if things will
and must be what he believes to be, his innocence, or in-no-sense, integrates his perplexity and
his confidence. Just like postmodernism whose feature is its skepticism of the adequacy of any
essential law (Sim, Postmodernism 289), this innocence is both a suspicion against other
possibility (Jacks confidence in what he believes) and an uncertain attitude toward what things

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shall be (his perplexity for how to respond other than sticks to his habitual acts). Therefore, this
thesis contends that Jacks innocence in White Noise exposes his or DeLillos irresponsive response
to postmodern conditionhe can neither criticize it nor accept it totally because he cannot help
remaining optimistically confident in what he believes for he has no other alternative responses.

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