The entire first volume of White Noise<\/i> is devoted to apparently anything but the “disaster” element. It opens as a first-person narrative, and relates to us – through the eyes of our narrator – the inner workings of (and delicate relationships strung between) himself and the other members of his family. On first reading, none of this storytelling made sense to me. That is to say, as a story<\/i>, it all made sense and flowed with fair coherency, but what I did fail to grasp was what, exactly, this rambling was attempting to achieve. DeLillo devotes the entire first volume of his novel to telling us nothing. We are introduced to the main characters – and then reintroduced, and reintroduced, and reintroduced yet again. We are handed every miniscule detail regarding their daily lives. We learn that some of them like to buy brand-less items at the grocery store, while others of them are loathe to enter the frozen foods aisle. Some go to church. Some teach Hitler. Some watch TV all together, one night a week. Some cry. Some are brooding. The only thing DeLillo refrains from telling us, it seems, is what brand of toothpaste they use.<\/p>\n
It is not until the second volume that the “disaster” begins to come into play. Why does DeLillo choose to delay the core of his story by so much? In Lucifer’s Hammer<\/i>, the comet occurs on the second page (of the first chapter). Yet DeLillo proceeds a full 20 chapters before he sees fit to bring his object of calamity into the picture. Why?<\/p>\n
I think the answer here lies in the novel’s title. Admittedly, I haven’t even come close to reading it all, but so far I can see no other clear explanation. DeLillo titled his novel “White Noise,” and this certainly doesn’t seem to refer to the source of the novel’s disaster (particularly not the way the title of Lucifer’s Hammer<\/i> refers directly to the Hammer-comet). (Granted, he originally had other plans<\/a>, but the end result remains, regardless, that he chose “White Noise” – which, for that matter, varies not too enormously from the original.) I feel that it instead relates to the method of his storytelling. In choosing a first-person narrator, DeLillo has made the decision to relate his story through the eyes of a human being, who can and will suffer all the limitations that fall on any human being. We have no reason to believe every word of the novel, for we have no reason to believe every word the narrator says, because the narrator is only human. We have no reason to trust in him, nor do we have any reason to believe that the entire account is a fiction, either. We simply don’t know<\/i>. This narrator chooses to spend 105 pages (in my edition) to do what could have been accomplished in 5 pages: introduce himself and the other characters of the story. What are the hundred other pages but white noise?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The entire first volume of White Noise is devoted to apparently anything but the “disaster” element. It opens as a first-person narrative, and relates to us – through the eyes of our narrator – the inner workings of (and delicate relationships strung between) himself and the other members of his family. On first reading, none… Continue reading Panasonic White Noise<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}