In addition to addressing the premonitory electricity of death, the title of Don DeLillo's White Noise alludes to another, more subtle, kind of white noise, the silent death of white suburban identity. . College-on-the-Hill is not only an elite academic promontory, but also a bastion of white flight to which Jack Gladney's family took refuge. Instead of the clear morals of John Winthrop, DeLillo presents us with JAK Gladney's confused postmodern legacy of JFK's civil rights legacy. Racial identity no longer demarcates a simple binary between whites and Native Americans, but complicates a nation in which all races claim American nativity. Jack's inability to classify the Other in obvious racial terms spills over into his own identity crisis; unable to assess what he is not, he finds himself without the tools necessary to understand what he is. This anxiety about a flawed racial organization leaves Jack with America's preeminent product, consumerism, as a cultural machete with which to cut away swaths of identity. But consumerism, exemplified by the supermarket's position as a site of societal reflection in the novel, is too dispersed and massive a philosophy to equip Jack with an ordered understanding of race. Moreover, any insight that consumerism might bring is negated by the production of a confusing strain of commercial colonialism. The most feasible "solution", even if the novel's continuing chaos negates any clear answer, is for Jack to accept racial hybridization and see the world not as white noise and black clouds, but as shades of gray. This lessens his anxiety over the need to identify others and, therefore, himself, across race, by flattening the three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional model for the sake of understanding, while allowing the idea to blur heterogeneity to exist elsewhere in his mind. Paradoxically, Jack can only gain this knowledge by accepting his ignorance, a fitting complement to his obsession with death, the great unknown for which science, intellectualism, and religion all concede defeat by explaining or conquering. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The most obvious form of racial classification in the novel emerges when Jack confronts the visual hodgepodge of a new multinational corporation: What kind of name is Orestes? I studied his features. He could have been Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, dark-skinned Eastern European, light-skinned Black. Did he have an accent? I wasn't sure. Was he a Samoan, a native of North America, a Sephardic Jew? It became difficult to know what you couldn't tell people. (208) For Jack, the immediate importance lies in the cross-references of race, the permutational mixing and matching that Jack performs on color and nationality that fuels his conversational anxiety. Several other keys to this anxiety lie in the name of Orest Mercator. Orestes could take his first name from Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who avenged the death of his father by killing his mother and her lover. The classical allusion repositions Orest as a mythological origin that blends both Greek myth and biblical allusions (returning to Eden and confronting the serpent) with his undetermined lineage. The binary extends to the quasi-palindromic nature of its name, beginning and ending with "or". This is different from an either/or forced “option” system; instead, Orest's two "or"s imply a ceaseless search for an answer. The fact that Orestes avengedthe death of his father reminds us that Orest's father is an unknown ancestor, originating from all continents. By confronting a “viscous” (267), slippery and serpentine death, Orest attempts to kill his indeterminacy, an equation that DeLillo writes throughout White Noise. Whereas "Orest" could allude to either the French "L'ouest" for West, or an English-French mixture of "Or-Est" (Or-East, negating the West movement of Manifest Destiny in other words, describing the flow of immigration and not colonialism), language remains the only definitive father of Orest while simultaneously enveloping an exact etymology behind layers of allusions and variables. Indeed, the language barrier and the breakdown of all language barriers and the unintentional creation of fluent, fluent Esperanto is what prompts Jack to need maternal protection at the supermarket checkout or, more directly , its urgency to protect the white uterus from heterogeneous inseminations: Not everyone spoke English at the ATMs, nor near the fruit bins and frozen foods, nor among the cars in the parking lots. More and more, I heard languages ​​that I could not identify and even less understand, even if the big boys were born in the United States and so were the cashiers? I tried to put my hands in Babette's skirt, on her stomach? (40) As if the unintelligibility of other languages ​​was not bad enough, Jack even has difficulty learning the Germanic language, supposedly his area of ​​expertise, and eliminates the contradictions and conflicts in his native English. Before reaching the cash register, Jack mutters "'Dirty blonde'" (40), a reference to his earlier statement that Babette's hair is "a particularly tawny shade that used to be called dirty blonde" (5). . He gives no reason why the term is no longer acceptable, but the fact that the adjective "blonde" generally denotes a hair color while "blonde" is a noun loaded with gender implications may have something to do with it. see with its censorship. Texturally, "dirty blonde" is appropriate, but orally it can be confused with the misogynistic "dirty blonde". As the founder of Hitler studies, Jack would be well aware of the additional quarrel this poses for Hitler's vision of a flawless master race; for Hitler, there is no such thing as a dirty blonde person, while for Jack, it is a sign of how the changing world can alter the relationship of language to visual identity. Showing restraint, Jack is careful to qualify his observation that his “complexion of the German professor was of a tone that I want to call flesh-colored” (32). Jack's sentence is in a tone that I want to describe as politically correct, even if that is not the real reason for its delicacy. Rather, he recognizes the havoc the new world has wreaked on the phrase “flesh-colored,” rendering it obsolete not due to newfound sensitivity, but gross inaccuracy. When even Bee, Jack's own daughter, is depicted as a racial composite of a "small, smooth, white face in a mass of frizzy hair" (92), DeLillo reminds us that even for those whose racial identity is clearly known, the visual remains blurry. This is why the most sacred suburban rituals are criticized in White Noise. After Jack attempts to play the staid role of an accommodating husband, Babette corrects his clinical use of the word "partner": "'I'm your partner when we play tennis, which we should start doing again.' Otherwise, I'm your wife'" (28). That she recommends that they take up tennis again, the clichéd institution of suburban sport, that married couples play in theirwhite club outfits, that it highlights their sterile sex life instead of sexual relations, that they look at old family albums, a return to a past which temporarily wards off the approach of death. Jack's castration through suburban ritual advances when he comes home one day in the transition between the traditional culmination of one fatherly routine (working as breadwinner) and the beginning of another (father by Normal Rockwell comes home with his evening paper, his slippers and his martini). : "When I got home, Bob Pardee was in the kitchen practicing his golf swing. Bob is Denise's dad. He said he was driving across town to Glassboro to do a presentation and thought he would take us all out to dinner” (56). Bob has usurped all of Jack's patriarchal duties, his secret job for the government allowing him to pay the family a one-shot night of his suburban golf swing. Jack no longer has these typical suburban traits to fill out his identity, and with their erasure comes the novel's treatment of the dissolution of suburbia. DeLillo, prefiguring his ideas in Underworld, refines his view of crowds as a case of security in numbers: “To become a crowd is to ward off death. To separate from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face death alone” (73). This is a reasonable explanation for the flight of whites from the city to the suburbs, their repulsion towards heterogeneity and their attraction to a homogenized subculture. However, the new heterogeneous composition of the city compromises this security; the town's name, Blacksmith, implies both a utilitarian element of white rural life and an anonymous black man, a black Mr. Smith. In the nearby countryside, a pastoral paradise of “white picket fences” and “fields of trails” (12) welcomes tourists to the most photographed barn in America. It's the next logical step for threatened suburbanites, a suburb only tainted. by the invisible and reassuring hand of capitalism and not by the visible mixture of integration. This integration is particularly visible in the black cloud of Nyodene D which, if we read as a visual metaphor for minority immigration causing a mass exodus of whites, finds its personification in the black family of Jehovah's Witnesses. Their family unit constitutes a coherent core of propaganda: “Father and son distributed leaflets to people nearby and seemed to have no difficulty finding willing recipients and listeners” (132). This is the new face of the suburbs; not a white father and son playing catch in the yard, but their black counterparts distributing philosophy to the white masses. It makes sense that white people would “volunteer” in the midst of death, that they would recognize the death of the old suburbs and the need to belong to yet another group. Murray connects mortal urban anonymity and the palliative identity of suburban death to consumerism: “In a city there are houses, plants and bay windows. People notice death better. The dead have faces, cars. If you don't know a name, you will know a street name, the name of a dog. “He drove an orange Mazda”” (38). The equation of the face with the automobile is just one of DeLillo's many plays with American consumerism as a signifier of identity. The helpless Treadwells are found “alive but shaken in an abandoned cookie shack at the Mid-Village Mall” (59). The trip to a suburban shopping center turns into a media tragedy; the cookies go from luxury to subsistence, the cabin becomes a real home. Jackredefines his personality in the same shopping center, savoring its shiny veneer: “I fulfilled myself, I discovered new aspects of myself, I found a person whose existence I had forgotten. Luminosity settled around me” (84). The blanket of blinding whiteness, the cloud of consumption, is both the cause and the cure for Jack's forgotten self, as is the alliterative rhythmic play of objects beginning with "b" and "s" in the opening catalog of clothes station wagon grows and drowns. the importance of each individual component (3). DeLillo takes this to the parodic extreme when a mountaintop Jack recites a list of gumballs: “I watch the light climb into the rounded tops of the high-altitude clouds. Clorets, Velamints, Freedent” (229). This form of consumerism, while harmless, hints at its inherent colonialism (here, a Wrigley line-up reconfigured as a Zen mantra). Expanding the reach of his empire is the white man's way of resisting integration into his own country (or city). Babette deflects a question about Dylar into a discussion about "the black girl who stays with the Stovers" (80), which leads to a conversation about the "country" Dakar, then turns into a culturally ignorant discussion about Africa and Asia informed by Hollywood Product. The conversation raises an even more ignorant question: “If she’s African,” Steffie says, “I wonder if she’s ever ridden a camel.” » Try an Audi Turbo. "Try a Toyota Supra." , an animal, cars only form a continuous bond through the encompassing reach of cultural colonialism. Colonialism provides all the rewards of a country's product without any of the dirty work; Murray praises the eclectic tastes of the world in supermarkets: “Exotic fruits, rare cheeses. Products from around twenty countries. “It’s like being at a crossroads of the ancient world, a Persian bazaar or a boom town on the Tigris” (169). DeLillo deepens the novel's view of colonialism beyond a simple critique of corrupt American values. Colonial history seeps into every crevice of America. life, especially those based on survival and information, the foundations of America's red-blooded Protestant values ​​and the first-rate success of the computer age. The evacuation of the city imitates the two-way sweep of the empire: The voice on the radio declared that the people of the city. west of the city were to head toward the abandoned scout camp, where Red Cross volunteers were handing out juice and coffee. People on the east end had to take the boardwalk to the fourth service area, where they would go to a restaurant called the Kung. Fu Palace, a multi-winged building with pagodas, water lily ponds, and live deer (119) Western advance toward America and its cultural signifiers (Boy Scouts, Red Cross, refreshments) contrasts exotic retreat with restaurant and demonstrates the natural tendency of the different. peoples to separate by geography and, subsequently, by culture. This fractured quality of colonialism is at the heart of Jack's confused relationship with the world: Our newspaper is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra. Something about the car makes me uneasy: the car waits with its headlights on, at dawn, while the man places the newspaper on the porch. I tell myself that I have reached an age, an age of unreliable threat. (184) The threat has something to do with the electronic surveillance carried out by the lifeless eyes of the car, but it also has to do with the confused delivery of the newspaper, delivered by an Iranian who drives a Japanese car. The newspaper broadcasts information on an increasing scale on current affairs" (184).