At one point in the novel, Jack says that he admires Wilder for his ability to get caught up in the sheer sensory pleasure of things, and then happily forget them in the wake of another new stimulus. This quality of Wilder’s is one of the chief reasons that Babette and Jack turn to him as a source of relief from their obssessive fear of death. Wilder, in his toddler state of pre death-knowledge, becomes a totem for warding off that fear in the adults. But a large part of Wilder’s happiness seems to be based on this quality of forgetfulness.
At the same time, Dylar, the fear of death repressing drug, causes forgetfulness. For Wilder, the world is centered solely on whatever new stimulus he is taking in. This breakdown in the overarching objective world in the face of an overriding series of individual stimuli is echoed also in Willie Mink. Mink’s sense of reality has been eroded by Dylar to the extent that he respouts lines from television prgramming randomly. Also, when Jack exploits the “suggestability” side effect with Mink he utilizes images and wordings drawn straight from the vocabulary of TV news sensationalism. Looking at Mink (as the ultimate manifestation of an artificial lack of the fear of death, or of Dylar itself), and Wilder (as the natural maniffestation), both show the fear of death to be inevitable; Mink is overcome with mortal fear during the simulated shooting, even if his fear is, in a sense, a simulation and Wilder will eventually grow out of his lack of fear. At the same time DeLillo is expressing the necessity of the fear of death, the only alternative being either the transient naivete of a child or the disabling lethargy and forgetfulness of the Dylar user.
Excellent analysis of these alternative views of what we might describe as obliviousness. Wilder and Mink both succumb to sensory input that does not accurately reflect the world around them. Wilder’s ride across the interstate in some ways is just an echo of Mink’s drug-induced fog. In what ways are they different then?