by Matt Lebeau

Created on: January 26, 2009

Don DeLillo's novel White Noise is a scathing critique on contemporary culture that uses the everyday language of buzzwords, special discounts, and limited time offers to create a world of fear, where people's perceptions are completely shaped by blind faith in the media, medicine, consumer products, and technology. Jack Gladney, the main character, completely preoccupies himself with concerns about his wife, job, and family while trying to ignore his greatest fear, the reality of death.

Jack knows that death cannot be escaped, and yet by remaining loyal to a culture of institutions he feels he can somehow sidestep it. The threat of a potential plane crash shows how one word can change Jack's entire system of beliefs. Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that is was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn't this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn't think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now.

The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do. The news spread through the plane, the term was repeated in row after row. "Crash landing, crash landing." They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future, to extend it in consciousness if not in actual fact. They patted themselves for ballpoint pens, went fetal in their seats. (DeLillo p90-91) Likewise, DeLillo demonstrates how a single word or phrase can possess the power to bring fear and death closer to reality. When a tanker crashes and releases a toxic cloud over Jack's town of Blacksmith he bases his concern on the vocabulary of the local news.

The description of the toxic gas is constantly changing, causing human reaction to escalate from indifference to panic. "The radio calls it a feathery plume," he said. "But it's not a plume." "What is it?" "Like a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke. Why do they call it a plume?" "They're not calling it a feathery plume anymore." "What are they calling it?" "A black billowing cloud." "What are they calling it?" "The airborne toxic event." (DeLillo p109-114) The symptoms resulting from exposure to the toxic cloud, or Nyodene D, are inconclusive and

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