White Noise
Don DeLillo (1985)
“The most American novel ever written — a family drowning in supermarkets, television static, and the certainty that they will die.”
Character Analysis
A man who has built an identity out of a costume (the robes, the dark glasses, the invented academic field) and is terrified that the costume is all there is. His fear of death is simultaneously his most relatable and most absurd quality: universal and neurotic, justified and comic. Jack does not grow or change by the novel's end — DeLillo refuses that consolation. He remains the same fearful, loving, self-deceiving man, slightly more aware of his self-deception.
Academic diction that slides into consumer-culture vocabulary without warning — he can discuss Heidegger and then list the contents of his refrigerator with equal gravity.