Death avoided leads to life voided.

One part of White Noise that I thoroughly enjoyed was the idea presented by Jack that all plots move deathward. This, combined with the Jack and Babette’s notion that death might be nothing more than perpetual white noise, presents an interesting paradox. While plots may move deathward, Jack and Babette’s unceasing fear of death is essentially what protects them from plot, and therefore death, at all. Much of novel is comprised of tangential observations of the hum surrounding the Gladneys, and as such, presents very little in the way of traditional plot. Instead of driving the novel with cliffhangers and revealing character development, DeLillo chooses to give the story life through an unceasing portrayal of the unceasing movements of Blacksmith. Without plot, though, can Jack of Babette really be moving deathward? And if not, why are they so afraid of it? Perhaps Jack himself wonders about this paradox, as he muses at the end of chapter six whether or not the statement was even true, and if he even meant it. This last speculation doesn’t seem too far off, though, in it that if Jack believes death to be the eternal hum, and his obsession with this hum is what prevents him from possessing a plot, then his fear of death is essentially protecting him from the ability to die. To advance the argument into a further state of abstraction: Jack is obsessed with the hum that he believes to represent death, while his obsession with it and DeLillo’s inclusion of it point to the hum being an audible representation of life. In this way, Jack’s obsession with the hum is an obsession with both life and death, and while he is stuck in such a binding liminal state he will neither live (possess plot) or die (because he doesn’t possess a life/plot to advance deathward).

So, I suppose, in order for Jack to ever die, he must first give up the fear of death. Tricky.

PS: So sorry about the lateness of this post…