I missed last week’s post so decided to try it out for this one. I chose to do it on a party, because it was one of those things where it was so obvious that no one probably even considered it.
Disclaimer: I’ve been watching too much anime, so sorry for the melodrama.
It’s Friday night and like as many college students would, I find myself at a party. The low bass booms out of large speakers, surrounding the mingling crowd with the impressive and talented auto-toning from Kanye West. Various faces are found- ugly, pretty, round, small, fat, but 99% of which are Asian. Forced and painstakingly high squeals are heard left and right, as girls greet one another with transparently false joy. Yells and groans are intertwined between the music and falsettos, which peak out randomly from the close but missed shot or the double cup winning score from the beer pong table. It’s not rare to find gossip leak from the lips of the slightly chubby and bitterly insecure young woman, whose face is marked with the “Beware: hard to please bitch”, and whose outworn words serve to only be either overlooked or to wound. Unintelligent, low-rate conversations of other people are to be expected. Beneath the sounds and noises, which are sometimes impossible to distinguish, the “White Noise” here has a root. A root of shaky, insecure college students who are desperate to be accepted, desperate to be recognized. Because don’t you know, when someone knows only loneliness, you may as well murder them.
After writing the above paragraph, a link within White Noise dawned on me. At the conclusion, I bring up being noticed and accepted, and how loneliness is a strangler, and I realize that loneliness is a huge theme in the novel. This loneliness creates the prevalent disconnectedness. Even the style at which it was written, the diction and dialogue is extremely disconnected. Examples? I don’t have the text on me, but when Jack went on the random shopping spree, the family drove back in silence and split up into their rooms. So much for family bonding. Even the fact that Jack and Babette went through multiple divorces–how lonely they must have felt after each split (though the author never quite picks it apart…hence the disconnectedness is tangibly the text). It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that divorces are much usually than not a difficult emotional process for couples. The fact that the author didn’t even dive into this aspect of Jack and Babette proves the disconnect from emotions. There is not one extremely personable moment in the novel (at least, that I can recall), not even when Babette confesses to Jack about her affair with Mr. Gray. Sure, she struggled a bit to finally fess up, but: 1. Is that really how a wife would tell her husband about how she sold her body for pills that didn’t even work but actually could be speculated worsened her condition, and 2. This is a little irrelevant to my point, but I just want to challenge you to wonder if Babette confessed because she really loves Jack, or if she was desperate to minimize her own guilt? There are several examples of both emotional and mental disconnection throughout White Noise (another being how the kids talk like they’ve just come out of grad school), but I feel like I’ve already trailed off onto weird tangents and I’m beginning to make less sense the more I type so I’ll leave it here before I further butcher. Hopefully I made sense.