White Noise Themes

No getting around it. Death is everywhere in White Noise. You might not see it at first, except in the ramblings of Murray Siskind. But as the plot of White Noise unfolds, DeLillo strongly hints t...

You might normally think that parents are the ones who are supposed to tell their kids what's what. But in White Noise, it's often the kids who take on the role of bestowing wisdom on the family....

From photographed barns to rain that might not be rain to simulated evacuations, we see that reality is pretty malleable in White Noise. It seems to shift based on people's perspectives, and Jack...

The technology and modernization that White Noise is preoccupied with is media. Specifically, it's the media of 1985: the TV and radio. These media are shown to be a force for change in the relati...

Forget about alcohol: White Noise is all about the drugs. More specifically, it's all about a tiny pill called Dylar that totally takes away your fear of death. The only problem is that the pill a...

Jack's a pretty sexual animal. So is Babette, and so is Jack's buddy Murray. Sex can mean several things in White Noise. It can be an intimate thing, a distraction, or even a safety blanket that m...

In a modern culture where people can't trust if the stuff around them is real, how can they trust that the stuff insidethem is real? Jack has spent almost all of his adult life building himself up...

In this book, Don DeLillo asks some pretty serious questions about the role of youth in modern American culture. First of all, the youths in White Noise seem to know more about the world than thei...