White Noise

“For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.” 

This quote from Alphonse is one of many in the novel that examines the relationship between television and the American family, one that is both intimate and yet firmly separated by the glass of the screen. This allows Americans to live vicariously through the drama and disasters that unfold on television without being imperiled themselves.

“Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd.” 

Here, Jack is talking as much about himself as he is about Hitler’s followers. He too gravitates toward Hitler as a shield against his own dying, hoping to build a legacy that will outlive him around a historical figure who commanded death to a degree never before seen in human history.

“I began to think he had disappeared inside this wailing noise and if I could join him in his lost and suspended place we might together perform some reckless wonder of intelligibility.” 

Wilder’s seven-hour crying fit creates a noise quite unlike the “white noise” Jack moves through in his everyday life. Jack imagines that by entering the reverberating notes of Wilder’s wails, he might be protected from the ceaseless hum of the outside world and everything it signifies.

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion.” 

For a man like Jack who values openness and honesty in his domestic affairs, Murray’s theory about misinformation and family cohesion is disturbing. Nevertheless, Jack can’t help but see the logic in it. And as the story progresses, there’s a strong argument that Jack is right to give himself over to Murray’s view. In some respects, the Gladneys are much happier when they ignore painful truths about the world and about one another.

“No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.” 

Afraid and full of self-pity over his eventual death, Jack contrasts his weak-willed self with various towering barbarians in history. He assumes that neither Attila the Hun nor Genghis Khan felt how he does about death. This quote later explains why Dylar cannot be tested on animals, for they do not fear death.

“It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.” 

Jack has just learned that his level of Nyodene D exposure constitutes a “situation.” Seeing his own death represented on a screen creates the same kind of psychic disconnect he felt when watching Babette on TV. The readout also represents an exponential compounding of white noise; Jack sees death itself emanating from a buzzing computer.

“Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God.” 

For all of Jack’s panic and fear over his own demise, he never seriously entertains the idea of an afterlife in an Abrahamic religious sense. It is as if God’s existence has been so utterly disproven by the events of the 20th century that it needs no further explanation. Nevertheless, this quote is evidence that Jack does have the capacity for spiritual and metaphysical reflection.

“What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.” 

In one of many intellectual confrontations between Jack and Heinrich, Heinrich tells his father that if they could go back in time to the Stone Age, they would have no practical knowledge that would improve the cavemen’s lives. Yes, they know about toasters and televisions and a thousand other modern conveniences, but they do not know how to build these things. And as more and more modern processes become automated, human knowledge will consist of little more than the mundane bits of trivia the Gladneys share on car trips.

“In its tremendous size, its dark and bulky menace, its escorting aircraft, the cloud resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboard, TV saturation.” 

This is the clearest and most vivid description of the Airborne Toxic Event looming over Blacksmith and the surrounding area. It is also very representative of Jack’s narrative voice, which combines awe-inspiring dread and wry commentary in the same breath.

“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”

While much postindustrial philosophy offers an optimistic view of science’s capacity to improve and extend human life, Jack is unconvinced. The strongest evidence for Jack’s pessimism is the Airborne Toxic Event itself, a cloud of chemical byproducts leftover from technological advancements in the field of pesticides.

“‘What if death is nothing but sound?’ ‘Electrical noise.’ ‘You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.’ ‘Uniform, white.’”

Here, Babette and Jack define death as an extension of the white noise from electrical appliances that fills their everyday lives. While these modern conveniences are ostensibly designed to make life easier, they persistently remind Jack and Babette of their own mortality.

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?” 

For most of the novel, Jack frames his fear of dying as a problem unique to him. For example, he doubts that Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan felt the same all-encompassing dread over their mortality. Once he sees it reflected in Babette, however, he is struck by the universality of fearing death.

“It was as though we’d been forced to recognize a second kind of death. One was real, the other synthetic.” 

When the insane asylum burns to the ground, Jack and Heinrich are repelled by the smell of burning plastic, a smell that would have been unfamiliar to preindustrial humans. This suggests there is a texture to the fear of dying experienced in the modern era that is uniquely unsettling.

“Forget the mind completely. The mind goes before the body. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. So don’t worry about the mind. The mind is all right.” 

Despite Vernon’s advanced age and poor health, there is little to suggest he feels the same anxiety about death that Jack and Babette do. This line may explain why; if fear is a byproduct of the mind and the mind is lost before the body, then it is impossible to experience fear at the moment of death.

“I don’t trust anybody’s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.” 

Jack spends most of the book in fear of the future. Here, the inverse is invoked: yearning for the past. Murray exposes nostalgia as deeply perilous and indicative of a rot at the core of societies—like Nazis—who indulge in it.

“Looking more closely I thought I detected a complex relationship between the size of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervals between the knots with loops and freestanding knots. Some kind of occult geometry or symbolic festoon of obsessions. I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness?” 

In the second half of the novel, Jack’s efforts to alleviate his ubiquitous dread through consumerism become futile. The scene of Jack digging through the rotting, putrid remnants of his family’s ritualistic materialism in search of the Dylar pills is merely the most explicit and extreme example of this futility.

“Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can’t bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.” 

Murray offers a counterpoint to Jack’s view that a fear of dying is built into the human brain. He also suggests to Jack the most practical—and arguably the most frequently used—solution to one’s fear of dying: repression.

"‘Doesn’t our knowledge of death make life more precious?’ ‘What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It’s an anxious, quivering thing.’” 

Jack puts forth a dispiritingly persuasive counterargument to the old trope that life is made richer by a knowledge of death. Jack struggles to separate a “knowledge” of death from a “fear” of it.

"Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you.” 

During their long-ranging conversation in Chapter 37, Murray gets to the heart of why Hitler can’t alleviate Jack’s fear of dying. Murray senses that on a subconscious level Jack sought to submerge himself in the murderous legacy of the 20th century’s greatest monster, hoping that doing so would minimize his impending death by immortalizing his professional legacy. Instead, Hitler only serves to preserve Jack’s Hitler studies persona, a facade.

“It’s a way of controlling death. A way of gaining the ultimate upper hand. Be the killer for a change. Let someone else be the dier. Let him replace you, theoretically, in that role. You can’t die if he does. He dies, you live. See how marvelously simple.” 

Out of all the advice Murray gives in Chapter 37, this is the one bit of counsel Jack finds persuasive. By reducing death to a simple mathematical binary, Jack finally sees a way through the pain and dread that torment him throughout the novel.

“This must be how people escape the pull of the earth, the gravitational leaf-flutter that brings us hourly closer to dying. Simply stop obeying. Steal instead of buy, shoot instead of talk.” 

The euphoria Jack feels in advance of his violent confrontation with Willie suggests that an underlying cause of his fear and misery is a lack of control and agency. Once his Nyodene D exposure deprived him of the comfort he once felt in his domestic, suburban, consumerist routines, it becomes clear to him the extent to which he has let himself be paralyzed by these things. While the action he takes to reassert his sense of self is suspect and extreme, the urge is a healthy one.

“The intensity of the noise in the room was the same at all frequencies. Sound all around. I took out the Zumwalt. Great and nameless emotions thudded on my chest. I knew who I was in the network of meanings. Water fell to earth in drops, causing surfaces to gleam. I saw things new.” 

The closer Jack comes to shooting Willie, the more clearly he perceives white noise, the representation of death in his mind. For Jack, the experience is akin to achieving enlightenment and a total understanding of the world and himself. For the first time, death is not something to be feared; it is something to embrace, in that it has gifted Jack with extrasensory powers of perception.

“Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life? I know I felt virtuous, I felt blood-stained and stately, dragging the badly wounded man through the dark and empty street.” 

Jack is comfortable with the fact that’s he found an avenue of escape from his “resolutely neutral life,” even if it means committing attempted murder. His thinking is a perverse twist on the axiom that virtue untested is no virtue at all.