DeLillo goes into detail to describe the conversations Jack Gladney has with family and friends.\u00a0 The conversations that stick out to me most include the bedroom conversation between Babette and Jack in Chapter 7 in which they argue for almost two pages about who should be pleasing whom.\u00a0 Jack says about the interaction, \u201cI get the feeling a burden is being shifted back and forth.\u00a0 The burden of being the one who is pleased\u201d (28).\u00a0 Both are reluctant to spell out what they want and instead act ridiculously polite.<\/p>\n
Though the interaction was supposed to be arousing (it’s about sex), the conversation is not sexy at all.\u00a0 I got the feeling that neither wanted to be pleased, and that perhaps neither wanted to do the pleasing.\u00a0 Babette doesn’t necessarily enjoy reading “sexy stuff” to Jack, though she seems to do it regularly-just like she reads the supermarket tabloids to Old Man Treadwell even though she thinks the reading material is trashy.\u00a0 Why does she do this?<\/p>\n
Another conversation that stuck out to me was one that Jack and Babette had with Murray Siskind in Chapter 9.\u00a0 Murray invites Jack and Babette to dinner, but is inordinately polite about it to the point that it sounds self-deprecating and silly.\u00a0 He says:<\/p>\n
I don’t want to feel like I’m holding you to something.\u00a0 Don’t feel you’ve made an ironclad commitment.\u00a0 You’ll show up or you won’t.\u00a0 I have to eat anyway, so there’s no major catastrophe if something comes up and you have to cancel.\u00a0 I just want you to know I’ll be there if you decide to drop by, with or without the kids.\u00a0 We have till next May or June to do this thing so there’s no special mystique about a week from Saturday.\u00a0 (40)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He seems desperate to make sure they know he isn’t trying to force them into “an ironclad commitment,” giving them several ways to back out of his invitation to dinner.\u00a0 He never says, “I really want you to come to dinner.”<\/p>\n
In both conversations, there’s a noticeable reluctance to state clearly what one wants, how one truly feels.\u00a0 People in the novel seem to use others as a gauge for how they should feel.\u00a0 I think that’s why the family watched Wilder “with something like awe” after his marathon crying session.\u00a0 Jack describes Wilder as coming back from “a place where things are said,” emphasizing how people don’t really say what they mean (79).\u00a0 Wilder’s crying was a true, intense expression of personal feeling, something that his family regards as a feat “of the most sublime and difficult dimensions” (79).<\/p>\n
Wilder doesn’t seem like a “normal” child.\u00a0 Jack mentions that he thinks Wilder is too big to sit in the supermarket shopping cart, yet it is his childlike behavior that endears him so much to Babette.\u00a0 Does Wilder have a mental disorder?\u00a0 It hasn’t been explicitly mentioned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DeLillo goes into detail to describe the conversations Jack Gladney has with family and friends.\u00a0 The conversations that stick out to me most include the bedroom conversation between Babette and Jack in Chapter 7 in which they argue for almost two pages about who should be pleasing whom.\u00a0 Jack says about the interaction, \u201cI get … Continue reading Week #2 \u2013 The reluctance of characters in White Noise to say what they really mean<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8,17,16,21,20],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-1","tag-art","tag-delillo","tag-real","tag-supermarket","tag-white-noise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions\/94"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}