One of the things that struck me about White Noise is how there were many things very un-artistic that were viewed in very beautiful and artistic ways. The manner in which Hitler is idolized, Murray’s seminar on car crashes, the toxic, pollutant-caused sunsets that everyone stands around in awe over, the idealization of sitting in a snake pit, Jack and Heinrich finding beauty in a house burning down… I don’t really have any enlightened ideas of what it all means, but I just kept thinking how unsettling it was that the characters in general, found things that would usually be taken as negative aspects of our society, or of life, and could transform them into beautifully artistic, or as Jack said at one point, “literary.” Jack’s romanticizing of carrying around a loaded pistol was another example of something that would usually be seen as dark, creepy, or as a breakdown of safety, is somehow turned into an empowering, fantastic experience. And I guess the real question is why is it easy for some things to be transformed into positives, and yet the greatest of all negatives, death, can’t be? Jack can find a burning house poetic but he can’t find the strength to accept the inevitability of dying. And so I was thinking of how accustomed we are to seeing violent things on television, how ‘entertaining’ it is to play Grand Theft Auto on your brother’s Playstation where you can use anything from a bat to an automatic machine gun to kill you opponents, and even how things such as the most recent hurricane season can almost feel like primetime television, just as entertaining and fascinating as any other network drama. None of it seems real so it can be glorified and artistic. I don’t know if it really has anything to do with why DeLillo chose to portray certain things in certain lights, perhaps he was just being artistically “literary” by providing such uplifting descriptions of such negative things. I just thought there was a definite contrast between how so many horrific things were described in a lighthearted manner throughout the novel, up until the final confrontation between “Mr. Gray” and Jack. The actual shooting of Mr. Gray is a very dark and eerie scene, even though I fully expected Jack to find something beautiful in the way the gunfire sounded, or the way Gray bled on the tile floor. But he didn’t because it was real, and I guess those are my thoughts on all that.