I’m interested in the snippets of dialogue spoken by the television and radio in White Noise. I think these snippets are examples of the proliferation of meanings rather than the breakdown of meanings for which postmodernism is known; or maybe the breakdown is the result of this profusion. This connection can be seen in two separate quotes from the novel. The narrator says that “The world is full of abandoned meanings” (184); Winnie Richards, the neurochemist, says that America “still lead[s] the world in stimuli” (189). It seems like stimuli lead to abandoned meanings. This can be seen in various conversations throughout the novel in which scientific knowledge is contested by pop cultural knowledge. For example, the conversation that begins with a question about outer space gets diverted by the objects pushed on them by the television. When the sun’s corolla is mentioned, Steffie says “I thought Corolla was a car,” and Heinrich responds that “Everything’s a car” (233). In this sense, the advertisements on radio and television perform a doubling procedure, twinning everything into a mess of overlapping meanings (one for each thing and one for the car-version of that thing). It’s interesting, too, that Dylar entered Babette’s life through an advertisement she found in a trashy tabloid. Dylar is a proposed cure for the fear of death, but it seems more like a metaphor for television. It is “delivered at specified rates for extended periods” (188). It is “technology with a human face” (211). “In a very real sense it doesn’t matter what is in those tablets. It could be sugar, it could be spice. I am eager to be humored, to be fooled” (251). But rather than the protection from death, the modern mass media provide the ‘stimuli’ that bring about the death, as well as the death of meaning through its very profusion. And Wilder is the only character who seems to recognize the falsity of its promise: “The small boy remained at the TV set, within inches of the dark screen, crying softly, uncertainly, in low heaves and swells, as Murray took notes” (105).