{"id":99,"date":"2008-09-06T21:48:08","date_gmt":"2008-09-07T01:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/?p=99"},"modified":"2008-09-06T21:48:08","modified_gmt":"2008-09-07T01:48:08","slug":"death-fear-of-blog-post-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/archives\/99","title":{"rendered":"Death \/ Fear of (Blog Post #2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span>(Vague Spoilers for some of you[?], and somewhat tangential.)<\/span><\/p>\n

It is interesting to look at how the different characters in White Noise <\/em>react to their own preoccupation with death. <\/span>(\u201cDeath has always been a preoccupation of man\u201d ? Anyways\u2026 ) <\/span>Heinrich\u2019s clinical, detached perspective and fascination with atrocities is offensive to us, in light of Jack\u2019s fate. <\/span>But Jack himself had a similarly detached perspective earlier in the novel, before the exposure. <\/span>So Heinrich static character acts as a foil to Jack\u2019s existential pondering, and later Babette\u2019s. <\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And then the Dylar is introduced. <\/span>Obviously, the drug starts off as an object of foreboding, becoming a tiny counterpart to the Nyodene D threat. <\/span>The cloud is an overwhelming phenomenon, opaque and oppressive, confronting the community as a whole with their fears (although noticeably not forging any real sense of community in the process, either overall or within the family). <\/span>The Dylar, in contrast, is insidious, encapsulating (ambivalent on that pun) the paranoia \/ hypochondria of the modern consumer. <\/span>Both, however, render their effects in unseen, uncertain ways. <\/span>Unnatural death for people in developed countries is no longer an external issue in the way that we think of it as spectacle in developing countries (fires, tsunamis, etc.). <\/span>Instead it is a delayed, lifelong process \u2013 anxieties about <\/span>plastic leaching into drinking water, <\/span>unexplainable, gradual neurological malfunctions, and so on. <\/span>It seems that, in general, the paralyzing fear of, or obsession with, non-immediate health problems is a luxury of the developed world. <\/span>It is difficult, however, to determine the main cause of these anxieties. <\/span>Information saturation (\u201cwhite noise\u201d) seems to be the largest component, but we are also living in a society where medications and (really) health problems are marketed directly to the consumer. <\/span>\u201cInstant gratification\u201d culture does not engender a psychological acceptance of the possibility of ongoing, debilitating health problems. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Vague Spoilers for some of you[?], and somewhat tangential.) It is interesting to look at how the different characters in White Noise react to their own preoccupation with death. (\u201cDeath has always been a preoccupation of man\u201d ? Anyways\u2026 ) Heinrich\u2019s clinical, detached perspective and fascination with atrocities is offensive to us, in light of … Continue reading Death \/ Fear of (Blog Post #2)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17,20],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-1","tag-delillo","tag-white-noise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99"}],"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\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}