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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Wilder, in his toddler state of pre death-knowledge, becomes a totem for warding off that fear in the adults.\u00a0 But a large part of Wilder’s happiness seems to be based on this quality of forgetfulness.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Dylar, the fear of death repressing drug, causes<\/em> forgetfulness.\u00a0 For Wilder, the world is centered solely on whatever new stimulus he is taking in.\u00a0 This breakdown in the overarching objective world in the face of an overriding series of individual stimuli is echoed also in Willie Mink.\u00a0 Mink’s sense of reality has been eroded by Dylar to the extent that he respouts lines from television prgramming randomly.\u00a0 Also, when Jack exploits the “suggestability” side effect with Mink he utilizes images and wordings drawn straight from the vocabulary of TV news sensationalism.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At the same time DeLillo is expressing the necessity of the fear of death,\u00a0 the only alternative being either the transient naivete of a child or the disabling lethargy and forgetfulness of the Dylar user.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 This quality of Wilder’s is one of the chief reasons that Babette and Jack turn to him… Continue reading Wilder, Mink, and the Fear of Death<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"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\/526"}],"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\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":530,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions\/530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}