Character Clues

Character Analysis

Clothing

Academic gowns, Budweiser shorts, jogging suits, you name it. DeLillo loves using clothing to say something interesting about his characters. Jack Gladney, for one, wears a fancy robe and dark glasses whenever he walks around his university's campus. The robe wasn't his idea, but he enjoys wearing it: "I like the idea. I like clearing my arm from the folds of the garment to look at my watch" (3.1). The dark glasses he wears, on the other hand, "were [his] own idea" (4.22). Jack wears these things because he wants people to see him in a certain way. The robe shows his power as the head of a college department, while the dark glasses are supposed to give a hint of coolness.

DeLillo uses Jack's clothing to show how everything in modern American culture tries to disguise what it actually is. This goes for each of us, too. We all try to do certain things to make people look at us a certain way, even if we try to look like we don't care. Jack's wife Babette, for example, always tends to wear her jogging outfit. Jack thinks this makes her look a bit sloppy, but it clearly tells us as readers that Babette is more interested in comfort than style. More so, it suggests that she is "too preoccupied with serious matters to know or care what she looks like" (2.8). The jogging suit immediately tells us that there's something on Babette's mind that goes deeper than fashion-consciousness.

Family Life

For DeLillo, modern media has given kids more access to information than their parents ever had. This access can lead to comical situations where you have kids educating their parents rather than the other way around. DeLillo gives us two main examples of this reversal in White Noise: Heinrich's philosophical conversation with his father Jack, and Denise's nagging of her mother Babette.

Heinrich is a precocious 14-year-old who shows that he can run circles around his dad (a university professor) when it comes something as simple as "It is raining." Heinrich answers his dad's statement by claiming that, "The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind" (6.10).

What follows is a conversation that's extremely frustrating to Jack, because Heinrich will never allow an argument to be settled with something as banal as common sense. He demands a fully rational explanation for everything, and shows his dad that this kind of explanation might not exist. In the end, Jack can accuse Heinrich of being difficult, but he can't force the kid to agree with him, not even on something as simple as whether it's raining.

Denise, on the other hand, aggressively applies logic and commonsense to her mother Babette. When Babette gets on a healthy-eating kick but then does what so many of us do and forgoes her healthy snacks for more delicious fatty treats, Denise calls her out on it. When Babette is chewing sugarfree gum in an effort to try to kick her smoking habit, Denise again lectures her on the cancer-causing chemicals in sugarfree gum and the stupidity of trying to replace one addiction (cigarettes) with another (gum).

Direct Characterization

DeLillo ain't afraid to tell it like it is, especially when it comes to directly telling us who his characters are and what they're like. Of course, we get all of our direct characterization through the eyes of our narrator, Jack. When thinking about his son Heinrich, Jack tells us, "The boy is fourteen, often evasive and moody, at other times disturbingly compliant" (6.1). We haven't really seen or heard much from Heinrich at this point in the story, so a comment like this goes a long way in coloring our view of him.

Occupation

Jack Gladney is one of the world's leading professors in Hitler Studies, probably because Hitler Studies is something he totally made up. Jack's occupation tells us a lot about his sense of professional insecurity. He feels like a fraud behind his tinted glasses and academic robe because he, well, kind of is one. He doesn't seem to fully realize the symbolic importance of his job until later in the book, when Murray explains to him, "Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you" (37.88). In other words, it's Jack's fear of death that has inspired him to study Hitler for a living.

Hitler was responsible for killing so many people that he lives on in history. On some level, Jack likes to think that studying a man like Hitler will protect him from death. Of course, this is silly. But then again, people do pretty silly things when they're scared of dying. Through Jack's occupation, DeLillo shows us just how deeply the fear of death is rooted in everything we do, even when we're not totally aware of it.

Speech and Dialogue

Some of DeLillo's best humor comes out in his dialogue exchanges. Funnily enough, DeLillo also seems to show us dialogue exchanges when communication is at its worst. The sections of back-and-forth dialogue usually come when two characters disagree or are totally unable to understand each other. Just check out this awesome exchange between Jack and Would-Be Snake Guru Orest Mercator:

"These are real snakes, Orest. One bite, that's it."

"One bite if they bite. But they won't bite."

"They are real. You are real. People get bitten all the time. The venom is deadly."

"People get bitten. But I won't."

I [Jack] found myself saying, "You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite and you will die." (27.54-27.58)

As you can probably tell, there's a pretty big communication gap between Jack, who's totally paranoid about death, and Orest, who's young and doesn't fear death at all, basically. Here especially, DeLillo uses a humorous exchange of dialogue to show how adults/parents like Jack try to force their fear of death onto younger people.

The younger people, represented here by Orest and Heinrich, refuse to buy into all this adult fear-mongering that Jack thinks is just plain commonsense. In this instance, DeLillo suggests that there are different ways of approaching death, and that perhaps the paranoid adult approach isn't always the best.