The Shadow of Death- Don DeLillo's "White Noise"

Tentative Thesis Paragraph  

 

 For this essay I am struggling a little bit and I am finding it sort of difficult to wrap my head around it! I decided to focus upon the main theme of “White Noise”, which was the fear of death. I thought it was odd how the main character of the novel, Jack Gladney, had an almost obsession with death. Jack’s fear of death is understandable since he use to live in an age before television and the mass media were constantly producing stories and topics that dealt with death. In a way it is much like today’s times, where you can’t turn on the news for a moment without it being some horrific tragedy. Below is my unedited introduction to our final essay, I am going to be making some changes in the future. J

Within the White Noise, a novel by Don DeLillo, there is many central themes ranging from supermarkets to natural and man-made disasters along with a hint of German language and electrical noise. But the key theme to this novel was the fear of death that came from the world changing from a simpler time into a more modernized world. Throughout the novel Don DeLillo paints a picture that all humans have a dominating fear of death, “I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it,” (DeLillo, 144). The main character of the novel, Jack Gladney, was one such character that had a borderline obsession with death. One of the main reasons why Jack has such a fear of death is because he is exposed to an airborne toxic chemical known as Nyodene D, which remains in the human body for thirty years but with a twist in fifteen technicians will be able to tell him his chances of survival. This fear of death is such a strong theme that it affects the main character, Jack, to a point where he twists it to a false reality just to escape his own fear. There are many themes within the “White Noise” but none of them are as strong as the symbol of death, each one of Don DeLillo’s characters has an attachment to death and that is what makes it the backbone of the novel.  

 Here is a link that I found that talks about how the fear of death is a like a phobia:  http://phobias.about.com/od/phobiaslist/a/thanatophobia.htm