Is Jack Gladney really possessed by his fear of death, or is it a symptom of some greater anxiety? As a white American male, it seems that Jack feels disempowered by the unceasing infiltration of "the Other" into his white-washed suburbian, middle-American utopia via immigration, technology, and globalization. Throughout the narrative, the reader is confronted by Jack’s inabilities to understand and accept the ‘foreign’ goods, services, and people that he encounters. According to literary critic Basu Biman, "signs of otherness, then, attach indiscriminately to people and personnel, products and services" in Gladney’s mind. For instance, the supermarket is a symbol of presumably white American capitalism, consumerism, excess, and even, gluttony (to some extent), but it has also become an suburban metropolis of the global market. Upon his first trip to the supermarket with his family in the novel, Jack sees a number of "exotic melons of several pastels" (36) to choose from and Murray, in a later supermarket venture, compares the modern American supermarket to "a Persian bazaar or boom town on the Tigris" (85). Jack is consumed by Orientalist notions of exoticism; foreign nationalities and cultures are feminized and ‘third-world,’ like the fruit they contribute to the world market that ends up on an American shelf. He is overwhelmed by the "small dusty third-world place" the American supermarket has become, and in concert with his children’s naive, but incessant talk of ‘other’ places and people, his wife’s illicit liason with Mr. Gray, an ethnic ‘other’ whom he feels he must confront and wrest control from, he ultimately understands infiltration of ‘the other’ to be an affront to his security and dominance as a white American man. Another example of Gladney’s discontent and xenophobia is at the moment he demands the "third-world technicians" emboddied in the modern ATM machine to "Speak English, for God’s sake."
As Jack plummets down the tunnel of percieved loss of self-efficacy and control, he becomes more and more obsessed with the fear of death, another instance of total loss of control, and the acquisition Dylar, a drug he believes will mitigate his anxieties. Shrouded in a black robe and sunglasses as he lectures with certainty on the intimacies of Hitler’s biography, even Gladney’s pseudo-identity as imperious professor and founder of Hitler Studies provides him inadequate agency, since his powerful presentation of Hitler is just that, a presentation and something that is not fundamental within Jack in real life.
Jack’s anxieties ultimately culminate in a violent act, the shooting of Willie Mink (Mr. Gray), who Jack insists is the embodiment of the agressive ‘other,’ in an attempt to regain his percieved loss of self-efficacy and reaffirm his ‘nationalist’ identity. This incident parallels Fight Club, insofar as Durden responds to the globalized consumer culture rampant in what he believes is a feminized, contemporary America with violent acts of terrorism in order to reestablish the white male’s masculinity and agency in a culture that has come to reject all that is white, Nordic, and male. Gladney is also comparable to Fight Club’s narrator, also named Jack in the movie, when Fight Club’s protagonist shoots himself in the head to be free of Durden’s psyche and to regain psychological solidarity and peace of mind. In the same way, when Gladney shoots Mink, but refuses to kill him, Jack feels that he has perhaps regained his masculinity and validity as a white American who is still able to maintain his identity in the shifting postmodern plain of invading ‘others.’ It appears, however, that DeLillo offers little in the way of an actual solution to the anxieties of men such as Jack Gladney, and it also seems that though Jack didn’t kill Mink, nothing has truly changed in Jack’s or his family’s lives. Is this DeLillo’s way of commentating on the condition of postmodernity, that there is no real solution to xenophobic anxieties, and moreover, does DeLillo suggest that there is, perhaps, no real problem either? Perhaps globalization and ‘the other’ are inevitable components of the American way of life, and despite the disbelief and resentment of middle Americans like Jack, it may be the dynamic, vibrant shine that makes the Unites States what it is.
